


fourteen

by emi_lyliz



Series: Wayward [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-05-08 08:32:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 46,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14690355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emi_lyliz/pseuds/emi_lyliz
Summary: A build off ofthirteenthat carries out the plot to a legitimate conclusion.





	1. Never Prayed Before; Ain't Starting Now

**Author's Note:**

> The schedule here is tighter. Expect chapters (roughly) every Monday and Thursday. It's got 23, like _thirteen_ , so it ought to be over with pretty quickly.
> 
> Also, for fun, all of the chapter titles are quotes from the actual show. Just so no one's confused as to why they're all so long.
> 
> Catch the _Breaking Bad_ references.

If one would have asked the Angel of Our Lord, Farrah, in the moment, to explain why she was now here, outside a supernaturally-fortified bunker in America’s heartland (and, more pressingly, in a whole new dimension) with the Winchester trio (alive, mind you—that’s jarring enough in its own right), Satan’s offspring, and the spitting image of an old comrade, she wouldn’t have felt exceptionally confident explaining how she’d gotten there—or why, or when, or whatever else one might want to know.

It was a wild ride; that’s what she knew and that’s all she cared to know. A new dimension meant a breath of fresh air for her, and she was aching to stretch her muscles. Not to mention, she was well-aware that she was the only celestial, excepting Jack, with a fully-functional set of wings. Comparatively speaking, she was feeling rather on top of things.

In her timeline, she’d been but a nuisance, a firebrand, a name to be used as a counterexample to perfection. By following the quintuplet across the rift, Farrah broadened her horizons. She was no longer a known name; she was born anew. The only baggage she carried would be that of her double, and once the air was cleared on that, she would have a new slate. Maybe she could lift Heaven to its feet this time around, rather than bring it to its knees. If the angels would have her.

The one slight setback she faced was the communication barrier. It had plagued the short-lived reign of Lucifer and Castiel~ as a duo over in her home-line, and, as such, it would plague her here. Being from the other plane, her angel radio wasn’t tapped in to the frequency here; she couldn’t receive the angels’ premium, priority communiqué. It wasn’t a good look. Withal, she persevered. She had conquered worse; what was a little communication breakdown after everything she’d been through recently? She would figure something out eventually, though she was unsure of what it would pan out to be.

She and her comrades stood outside the entrance to the bunker, at her insistence. She’d offered to fly them all to Kansas from North Cove, provided they would do her the favor of allowing her to bask in the warmth of the sunlight.

“You forget how that feels,” she sighed, closing her eyes and outstretching her arms to welcome the breeze across her body. Once it died down, she breathed weightlessly and opened her eyes, looking around her group. “Biblical war really puts a damper on the weather, you know? All the dust and the smoke and—it’s not my favorite climate.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Dean replied, tilting his head lightly. He folded his arms across his chest, polite enough to wait her out but impatient enough to do so aggressively.

“After awhile, you start to lose track of nighttime versus daytime,” she scoffed. “It’s less a matter of ‘sunlight’ or ‘moonlight’ and more… ‘darkness’ or ‘more darkness.’”

“Lucky for you we don’t have an archangel problem then.”

“Lucky for everyone, I’d say.”

As it stood then, it didn’t appear as if they’d had much of any problems once they left the Alternate Reality. Lucifer was gone. Mary was home. Castiel was alive. Everyone was safe and accounted for. Everything seemed to be rather in order.

Eventually Farrah gave them the cue that she was ready to go inside. Upon entering the bunker, the collective realized that perhaps their euphoria—whatever that meant in the context of their reality—was unjustified.

The place was torn to pieces; it was as if while they were off fighting in Farrah’s war, the Armageddon of this dimension had played out in the heart of the bunker. And in the library, laying across the table, was a body. The group looked around at one another; the body was living. They could see the (albeit slow and cumbersome) oscillations of the chest as it breathed. However, none of the six wanted to be the person(/celestial) to investigate should something go further awry, and, as a result, they all stood uncomfortably in their huddle, hoping someone else would take charge.

Eventually, since Castiel and Farrah were in the front of the pod, Farrah took matters into her own hands and volunteered him, pushing him out of the group. He stumbled forward slightly and turned back around to give her a glare. She simply shrugged and silently nodded toward the body, her command for him to check it out. He responded with a sigh, rolling his eyes, but he ultimately turned around and gave in, cautiously approaching the body with one hand tightly coiled around an angel blade in the pocket of his coat and the other held in front of him as a shield.

Farrah couldn’t help but scoff at his melodrama. “It’s obviously not that dangerous, Castiel,” she teased. “Poor thing can barely breathe.”

Castiel stopped but did not turn around to face her. “Then you come check it out, Farrah.”

She took a step back, further into the pod. “No, no, it’s fine, Castiel, really. After all, you’re so much closer than I am.”

He shook his head and resumed his stance, continuing to near the body. Farrah crossed her arms as he reached it, looking down at it with a raised eyebrow.

It did not move, outside its breathing, even as Castiel towered over it.

“So that’s your move?” Dean asked. “Stare at it?”

“What do you suggest, then?” Castiel growled.

“Interact, Castiel,” Farrah sighed. “They probably don’t even know you’re there.”

Castiel, again, rolled his eyes, but he continued to oblige to his friends’ whims. He pulled the angel blade out of his pocket. Still holding it, he reached out to touch the body, lightly shoving its shoulder. There was no response. He did it again—still nothing.

He turned to the other five and shrugged. “I don’t—” His thought was interrupted as the body suddenly sprang to life and grabbed him by the wrist, its grip tight like a vice. The surprise caused the angel blade to fall from his hand with a loud _clang_ on the table. He tried to pull away, but the person—a young man, it appeared—would not let him go. His heart began to race as the man got to his feet and put his other hand on Castiel’s shoulder, backing him into a wall. Afterwards, he wrapped both his hands around Castiel’s throat. They were frigid, but their grip wasn’t tight; despite the chokehold the man had on him, the angel could breathe just fine.

Still, the compromising position didn’t bring him any comfort, and so he tried to fight the man off of him, but to no avail.

Castiel (and Farrah), did, however, notice one important detail—the body was human and unoccupied, at least at the moment. It was comforting to know. Granted, this still left them with questions. If this was merely a man, how was he able to override Castiel’s powers with ease?

Farrah, finally deciding someone should lend Castiel a hand, flew behind the man. She noticed when she came close that he was whispering as he held Castiel. Presumably, the incantation gave him his power. Conveniently, she was wearing a bandana at the time; she had always been one for the Rosie the Riveter look. As such, she took it out of her hair and wrapped it into a tight rope which she swung around his head and through his teeth, tying it behind him to keep it in place while she grabbed his arms. He tried to fight her, but she was now significantly stronger. As such, she was able to pull his hands behind his back. “Get something for these, why don’t you?” she suggested to Castiel, who nodded and ran off to the dungeon as fast as he could. In the meantime, the man struggled against her hold, but he was rather simple to overpower now that he couldn’t give himself a lift.

Castiel returned fairly promptly with two pairs of handcuffs from the basement, one of which he locked around the man’s wrists immediately. After he and Farrah sat the man down, he used the other pair to attach the man’s ankle to the leg of the chair he occupied. He was glaring up at the angels now, and he looked over sharply as the other four gathered closer to the action.

“What do you suppose?” Mary asked, targeting her question at no one in particular and looking about at the people surrounding her before returning her gaze to the man in the chair.

Farrah shook her head, leaning her weight onto her left leg as she looked the man over multiple times. “Can’t say,” she replied dryly.

“Prophet,” Castiel replied shortly.

“Excuse me?” Dean interjected, stepping towards Castiel. He narrowed his eyes. “A _prophet_? We have Donatello for that.”

“Evidently not.”

“Guess we missed something while we were on vacation,” Sam replied, looking about the bunker. “Probably something to do with… this,” he added, gesturing to their surroundings.

Dean sighed. “Alright, fine. This man’s the next prophet in line. Great. Who is he?”

“Remy Fring,” Castiel answered stiffly. “I assume. That was the next name on the list after Donatello. But we’ve been out of the loop, so, theoretically it could be almost anywhere down the line by now—to a point. Some of the names on the list haven’t been born, of course.”

“Right,” Dean said, eyeing ‘Remy.’ He stepped forward, standing in front of their captive now, and inclined his head. “Is that your name then? Remy?”

The man snarled and irritably tilted his head to the side to more prominently display the bandana gag.

“So use your body language.”

The man rolled his eyes, but he ultimately chose to give in. He shook his head.

Dean looked to Castiel. “It’s not him,” he translated, though the angel knew perfectly well what the man had communicated. “Who’s next in line?”

“Jane Xavier. I’m guessing that’s not who we’ve got.”

The man shook his head.

“Try again,” Dean said. “Just run down the list until we get a match.”

“Sure. Calvin Mayhew. Quentin Ortega. Ella Pinkman. Hector Snyder. Eugenia Gilligan. Tatiana White. Declan Schrader. Hunter Aaron…”

He listed each off with a pause to allow the man to react. It wasn’t until ‘Hunter’ came along that the man nodded.

“That’s it?” Dean confirmed. “Hunter Aaron—that’s your name?”

The man nodded again.

“That’s… a long list of prophets you went through, Castiel,” Farrah observed. “Is that in order? Or is that just the first few you remembered?”

“It’s in order.”

“Fantastic,” she sighed. She turned her attention back to Hunter, who was now looking between all six of the people around him. “So what happened that knocked out that many prophets?”

“You’re asking the wrong people,” Dean replied. He pushed her lightly out of his way to allow himself the space to step behind the chair and undo the knot tying the bandana around Hunter’s head. He pulled it off and returned to his original position, handing the bandana back to Farrah, who tossed it to the table. “Ask him,” Dean insisted.

“What happened, Hunter? How are you a prophet already? There were—” She paused to count in her head. “There were a whole nine others in front of you after this Donatello. How exactly did ten prophets get knocked off the board?”

“Heaven is angry,” Hunter replied with a shrug.

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s a Nephilim. And it means he’s born of Lucifer. And it means Hell has been after the kid from the jump. And it means Heaven intends to find him first.”

“Right, of course. But why eliminate the prophets?”

“Pawns in the war, I suppose. We’re used to read the tablets and then get taken into battle, and, as it turns out, we’re not a very powerful breed. No one’s come out alive until me—and I just barely did. You saw the state I was in.”

“Angels are taking you into combat?”

“No, ma’am. The demons are.”

“How do they know who to take?” she scoffed. “The angels have the list.”

“Corruption.”

“They have an _angel_ down in Hell?”

“At least.”

“How many angels, Hunter?”

“It’s anyone’s guess now.”

“Fantastic.”

He shrugged. “If it’s any consolation, ma’am, the demons think I’m dead. They’ll be in pursuit of the next person on that list, right? But it’ll be a bust—I’m still around.”

Castiel shook his head. “Doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. If they’ve got angels, then they’re aware you’re alive. The angels would know if another prophet were called.”

“What does that mean for me then?”

“Welcome to the team, Hunter,” Dean replied.


	2. A Conduit for the Inspired Word

The bunker was now housing significantly more people than it had been. Originally, it was the abode of no one but Sam, Dean, and Castiel. Nowadays, it needed to accommodate a whole seven people. Farrah made herself scarce overnights to help with the housing predicament; since she could fly and, being an angel, did not sleep, it wasn’t much trouble for her to only be around when she was needed. Castiel and Jack had merged a room now, where before they had been separate. This was much for the same reason as Farrah vacating the scene while the humans slept; wasn’t much use in taking up needed lodging space for beings who didn’t (or barely did) sleep, after all. It freed up a room that Hunter would assume. Sam, Dean, and Mary, of course, all had rooms already.

After a few days, they’d finally gotten the bunker tidied up.

Dean had covertly hoped keeping Hunter comfortable would bring him to espouse whatever information he had. However, it had been four days since they’d first met, and Hunter had said nothing new as of yet, which was starting to grate on Dean’s nerves. They were no longer, after all, in the protection of the Alternate Timeline. Heaven and Hell’s missions to capture Jack may have been thwarted by their absence, but now that they were back on this plane, Jack was a target able to be found. Dean was well aware of this, and he also knew the only source of information in the house was Hunter. Yet he was troubled finding a way to get the newcomer to speak.

The two met incidentally that morning in the kitchen. They’d awakened at roughly the same time and had headed down to fix breakfast. Neither was expecting company, but, since they had it, they ran with it. After all, Dean wasn’t the only one with questions.

“I’m new to all this, you know?” Hunter said casually as he put three pancakes on his plate.

“To what? Breakfast?” Dean teased. He, too, put three pancakes on his plate.

The pair sat down across from one another at the table. “No,” Hunter scoffed. “No, I mean this… _God_ stuff.”

“Most prophets say that.”

“I was a cashier before my ticket got punched, making minimum wage,” he recalled. “Now, I’m not even sure what’s going on anymore.”

“Again, most prophets say that kind of thing. Donatello? Man was a professor before he got dragged into all this. Knew a kid a few years back named Kevin who was a high schooler. It’s part of the gig, I suppose. One minute, you’re normal; the next, you’re reading tablets with angels.”

“Or demons, in my case.”

“Right, of course.”

“How do you know about all of this if you aren’t a prophet?”

“I had one hell of a father.”

“Well, how did _he_ know?”

“I had one hell of a mother.”

Hunter pursed his lips. By that point, he’d already progressed to his second pancake.

The duo expanded to a trio at the arrival of Castiel. He’d been up the entire time, naturally, but he had just then made his way to the kitchen. “I heard talking,” he said with a shrug. “Figured I’d see who was up.”

“Hey, Cas,” Dean greeted. He began eating his third pancake.

“Dean,” Castiel greeted amicably. He nodded to Hunter. “Prophet.”

“Angel.”

Hunter had been filled in on a few details since waking up in the bunker. He knew Farrah and Castiel were angels; he knew Sam, Dean, and Mary were blood; and he knew Jack was a Nephilim—though that part he knew well before thanks to the demons. In the four days he’d been around, he and Castiel began referring to one another by their breed rather than their names, though he wasn’t quite sure why. The angel had started it, and he had just followed Castiel’s lead.

Hunter gestured to the plate between him and Dean, which had the four extra pancakes on it. “Care for any?” he asked Castiel.

The angel shook his head. “I’ll pass,” he replied. He took a seat to Dean’s left. “Angels don’t eat. We _can_ , but it’s not worth the effort.”

Hunter inclined his chin. There was a brief silence before Hunter broke it by asking, “Would it be rude of me to ask about the Nephilim?”

“Jack?” Dean clarified. “Depends what you want to know, I guess.”

“Forgive me if this sounds… improper. But why are we harboring the son of _Satan_? Isn’t he the literal Anti-Christ?”

“I guess so.”

“So why keep him safe then? One would think he’s destined to…”

“He’s a good kid, Hunter.”

“The thing about Nephilim is that they’re more unpredictable than angels,” Castiel added.

“And this is good?” Hunter asked with untrusting eyes.

“They’re half-human. It’s not hard to wire an angel into whatever you need it to be; it’s a lot harder to do that to something with a human soul. If that makes sense.”

“To a degree,” Hunter replied, crossing his arms.

“Jack has both archangel grace in him and a human soul. Whereas a pure angel—like myself—can be easily programmed, usually into a soldier, a human soul won’t allow that. So, like humans, he has his own will. As long as he’s raised right, he should be perfectly fine.”

“The angels don’t like Nephilim.”

“No, you’re right. They despise them. Nephilim are considered abominations.”

“If angels are so easily programmed, how is it that two are rebelling against Heaven then and protecting an ‘abomination’? How is it that many are rebelling against Heaven and siding with Hell? It doesn’t add up.”

“There are always chinks in the system, Hunter. Theoretically, if Heaven wanted to rewire any one of us to ‘fix’ that, they could. But they’d have to catch us first. Ever since the angels fell, Heaven’s operated… considerably less smoothly than before.”

“I don’t want a part of this.”

“You don’t have a choice anymore, I’m afraid. Your prophethood was destined; God Himself put your name on that list.”

“But why?”

“Why does God do anything?”

“You’re a celestial. You should have answers. You’re from Heaven, right? That’s God’s domain.”

“I’m an angel, true, but a poor example of one. And besides, you’re mistaken. God is much more hands-on down here than He is upstairs.”

“He doesn’t seem to be that ‘hands-on’ down here to me.”

“So that should speak volumes of Heaven.”

Hunter tensed his muscles.

“You’d be surprised what they do and do not tell the angels. You know you’re the only one on Earth right now that can read those tablets? I can’t; Farrah can’t; Jack can’t. Even though we’re all celestials. That’s all on you. We’re more warriors than sages; your books have gotten it confused.”

“I still don’t understand why God chose me.”

“No one ever understands why God chooses them. God doesn’t understand why He chose you. It just happened that way.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Dean interjected. “Being a part of this—it’s not for cowards, Hunter. But if you can man up and play your part, you’ll help save the world.”

“Is that so?” Hunter asked. “How is my translating some God-speech ‘saving the world,’ Dean?”

“Because it gives us the edge, Hunter.”

“And how do I know giving that edge to _your side_ saves the world? Why don’t I trust the angels? After all, I’m _their_ prophet.”

“If the angels were worth siding with, Farrah and I wouldn’t be here,” Castiel countered. “And there wouldn’t be however many teaming up with Hell. And Jack would already be upstairs in Heaven—or dead, assuming they’re correct about Nephilim.”

“So what’s this team fighting for then?”

“Keeping Jack alive, and keeping him away from Heaven and Hell. Ending the war. Saving as many lives as possible. That’s the endgame, Hunter. It’s quite simple, really.”

“I can stand behind that last part,” Hunter conceded with a nod. “But I’m wary of the kid. If Heaven’s wary of Nephilim, I feel like I ought to be also.”

“No, Hunter, you _ought_ to be wary of Heaven.”

“Oh?”

“I would know.”

Hunter pursed his lips.

“ _I’m_ the celestial. What qualifies ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ in Heaven and on Earth are quite different; experience says so.”

“Fine. Say you’re right. Then what? How do I fit in here? I can’t _fight_ ; all I have to offer you is translations, and even that’s not an efficient process.”

“Those translations can be powerful tools, Hunter, depending on what you translate. And as long as we know you’re here, we know you’re not off translating the tablets for Heaven or Hell.”

“Not to mention you’ve at least seen the inner workings of Hell, yeah? You said they kept you down there before bringing you to fight,” Dean added.

“I know some things,” Hunter admitted.

“We’d love to know them too.”

“I’m sure you would,” Hunter scoffed. “But it’s not much. They weren’t giving me luxury treatment or anything; I was pretty much just a bludgeon.”

“Still—a little information is more than no information.”

“Fair point.”

“Here—who’s Queen Bee now that Crowley’s off the table? Start there.”

“She’s young. I can’t quite remember her name…”

“It’s a she,” Dean noted with a nod. “You say she’s ‘young’—what does that mean?”

“It means she only came to Hell a few years ago. Pretty much just turned and she’s already taken control of the place. I think someone said she arrived in 2008. The name is on the tip of my tongue… It starts with a ‘T.’”

“I would help, but I’m a little rusty on my newly-minted demons.”

“Shut up. Tal—Talbin? Talbert?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Talbot?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Hunter exclaimed. “Talbot. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Dean sighed. “Figures Bela would land herself the crown.”

Hunter narrowed his eyes. “Right,” he said slowly.

“We go way back.”

“I can see that.”

Sam entered the room, showered and ready for the day. His hair was still dripping when he showed up. “Did I hear you mention Bela Talbot?” He asked as he got himself a glass and filled it with water.

“Unfortunately,” Dean replied. “Guess who Crowley’s replacement is, Sammy.”

Sam dropped the glass, which shattered on the floor.


	3. You Don't Even Die Right, Do You?

Lucifer lived.

Good of friends as Raphael and Castiel~ had been, the former was never one to deny himself an opportunity. And when another archangel—a stronger version of the Devil himself—was brought into the equation, it was an opportunity. He kept himself well out of Castiel’s~ reign, and all the while he had Lucifer espousing what he knew. They kept themselves remarkably off the radar. When Jack had tried to reach Lucifer oh so long ago, to create a diversion to allow Farrah to be sprung from Heaven, they had intentionally done everything in their power to subdue the line, removing Lucifer’s grace for a temporary period until the damned thing stopped resonating. Once it had, they returned it to the vessel. It was like this that Raphael waited out Castiel’s~ turn at the helm with unnerving patience; he had the ability to wipe the angel off the map with the snap of his fingers, but he was cleverer than that. He let his friend hold the reigns long enough that he wouldn’t inherit Castiel’s~ problems—namely, Farrah and her little troop of rebels. Once they’d satisfied themselves and their egos and taken Castiel~ off the throne, they wouldn’t be an issue. The position would be vacant. Heaven would be well and truly Raphael’s.

And, of course, Lucifer’s. Yet again.

They bonded quite well with one another; once Castiel~ and Naomi were out of the picture, Raphael and Lucifer assumed their respective positions. Raphael held the vanguard; Lucifer, being well-versed after centuries in the Cage, gave interrogating a remodel. Hannah, who had been at Raphael’s side long before his ascent to power, assumed what had originally been Castiel’s~ position under Michael. Bartholomew worked closely under Lucifer as he had under Naomi. Farrah was gone. Team Free Will was gone. Bobby and Rufus were uninterested; Lucifer and Raphael kept themselves quiet. Things were smooth sailing.

Eventually, they began to look for means of entering Lucifer’s dimension. Lucifer wanted to find Jack. Raphael wanted the universe at his command. Together, they’d reach their goals. Together, they’d bring the multi-verse to it’s knees.

They knew it had to involve archangel grace. After all, plenty Nephilim had been born in the past—in both dimensions—with the average angel, none of which had been able to tear a hole in time and space. Yet Jack—the first of his kind—managed it. The only difference between him and any other Nephilim was his archangel’s grace. Thus, the deduction.

Hannah was the one who suggested calling a prophet.

Initially, Raphael had insisted it wouldn’t be necessary. A prophet hadn’t been called in their dimension for quite some time, and, with some exceptions, things had run relatively well. In spite of his apprehensions, however, it didn’t take long for him to come around, especially once Lucifer jumped on board.

“Maybe there’s something in the tablets,” Hannah said. This was the fifth time she’d brought up the idea to Raphael, but it was only the first time he’d bothered to listen to it.

“Those tablets are emergency hatches,” he scoffed. “Father didn’t write them for casual usage, you know. They’re for… catastrophe.”

“Then I would say their usage is well overdue, wouldn’t you?”

Raphael rolled his eyes. “Say we retrieve a tablet and one of Father’s chosen ones. Who’s to say there’s anything in them on dimensional rifts?”

“God crafted the universe. Universes. The multi-verse. He crafted me—and you. I have a hard time believing a being who pays such attention to detail would overlook something like that in His manuals. Besides, what God makes a multi-verse _and_ makes it possible for different dimensions to interact but still decides to leave that out of His Word?”

“I suspect she has a point, Raphael,” Lucifer interjected. He had been silently listening to Hannah and Raphael’s discussion and had heard her throw out this idea time after time. Only now did he decide to vouch for it with her.

“On what grounds, Lucifer?” Raphael asked, inclining his chin.

“How long has it been since those tablets were touched?”

“A long time.”

“They’re fairly popular on my side of the fence. You’d be surprised just how much use can be made out of them. And, for the record, not all of what’s on them is safeguards against failure. There’s a little bit of everything on them.”

“But is there interdimensional travel?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“So my point still stands.”

“What’s the use speculating?” Hannah asked, raising her voice slightly as she became more impatient. “Let’s just operate on the assumption that they do. We find the tablets and have them translated. And _then_ we know whether what we need is on them.”

“That’s a costly time investment, I’m afraid,” Lucifer replied coolly. “It would take a good few months to translate the entirety of a single tablet—let alone all three. To play devil’s advocate, of course. No pun intended.”

Hannah’s posture fell slightly. “So what do we do?”

“Find the scribe,” Raphael said.

Hannah narrowed her eyes, nodding slowly as she thought over his suggestion. “That’s a good idea, actually. Metatron would know what’s on them; he wrote them down.”

“Alright,” Lucifer breathed. “Where do you suppose we begin?”

“Oh, it’s not too hard. We just get Hannah’s division to track him down,” Raphael assured casually.

“It’s what we do,” she affirmed. “How else do you think Castiel~ knew Farrah would be in Portland?”

“Memories,” Lucifer sighed.

Hannah scoffed. “Harder times, Lucifer.”

“No one’s denying it. You know I’ve now been stabbed in the back by two versions of the same seraph? I’m beginning to think it’s part of the package.”

Hannah laughed slightly. “He always was a hard one to get on with,” she admitted. “I never met your version of him, though. Can’t say much. Although I do know it was his blade that took down ours, so I assumed as much.”

“Headstrong son of a bitch that one is.”

“I’ve heard. Bartholomew told me _all_ about him. You know they spent a lot of time together down in the prison?”

“It’s deserved.”

“Can we lay the past grudges to rest?” Raphael interrupted. “We’ve all had our problems with Castiels. Wonderful. That’s not the priority.”

“Right, of course,” Hannah said. “Tablets.”

“Scribe.”

“Scribe.”

“That would be your cue, Hannah.”

“Right, of course. I’ll let you know what my team finds out.”

“Make it quick, Hannah.”

“You know I will, Raphael,” she replied with a smirk.

At that, she flew off, leaving Raphael and Lucifer on their own.

“In the meantime,” Raphael said, setting Lucifer’s attention back on their task. “Why don’t we see if we can figure out how the whole prophet thing works.”

“It’s really not that deep, Raphael. He didn’t make it too complicated. Find a tablet, and it’ll call a prophet for you.”

“Yes, I know,” Raphael sighed. “I’m not incompetent, brother.”

“So forgive me, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to ‘figure out’ then,” Lucifer scoffed, crossing his arms. “There’s nothing to work out if it handles itself.”

“You may have noticed the lack of humans on Earth right now.”

“It may have registered.”

“So who’s to say our list of prophets is… reasonable.”

“Go on.”

“It’s highly likely the whole list is wiped out or unborn by now. Almost as if biblical catastrophe creates a body count.”

“So sarcastic today. Ease up, Raphael.”

“What do you suggest, Lucifer? You’ve got more practical experience here.”

“I have very limited practical experience with how Heaven operates. You may have heard the backstory? Something about being locked away in a Cage in Hell.”

“Now who’s being sarcastic?”

“I’m the devil. I get to be sarcastic.”

Raphael rolled his eyes. “Well, that aside, you still have more than I do. We haven’t called a prophet in eons, Lucifer.”

“Alright, alright,” Lucifer breathed. “Look, God might not be the best parent, but He’s an expert carpenter. He built His systems to be essentially foolproof. Demons acting up? Lock the Gates of Hell. Second-born son getting out of line? Lock him in a Cage. Leviathan destroying the planet? Lock them in Purgatory. You get the picture.”

“So how does that apply here?”

“It means there’s nothing short of permanently destroying all three tablets the angels can do that will stop his prophetic line of succession,” Lucifer scoffed. “Father was always so paranoid about things going wrong.”

“With good reason, it appears.”

“Just because he was right doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Raphael pursed his lips.

“There’s bound to be a prophet somewhere,” Lucifer continued. “It’s just that no one knows it yet because no one’s bothered to call one.”

Raphael began pacing, though it wasn’t from apprehension. All the conversation created a lack of activity, and his vessel was beginning to grow restless. “It’s funny,” he said coolly.

“What?”

“I’m planning to break into an alternate dimension. And I’m teaming up with the devil to get it done.”

“The devil is your brother, Raphael.”

“I just always assumed the highest post I’d take would be… something under Michael. I think that’s what we _all_ assumed. Michael would lead, Castiel~ would be his lapdog, and Naomi would keep the soldiers in line.”

“Times change.”

“It’s good that they do,” Raphael laughed lightly.

“Oh?”

“Michael was a tyrant.”

“Castiel~ was a tyrant.”

“Father was a tyrant.”

“It appears to run in the family.”

“It stops here.”

“Does it? Given our ambition, it seems potentially tyrannical to me.”

“We aren’t tyrants, Lucifer. We’re… businessmen. And we’re simply expanding our horizons.”

“Damn straight we are.”


	4. And Maybe I Should Feel Guilty

Farrah hadn’t shown up to the bunker in a solid few days, so when she finally did, she wasn’t greeted particularly amicably.

She timed it, by chance, well enough that she’d caught the entire collective around the table, talking Hunter through things—as had been the norm as of then. The new prophet was still not taking kindly to his position.

“Winchesters. Castiel. Prophet. Nephilim,” she greeted, folding her arms. “Long time, no see. What have you crazy kids been up to recently?”

Dean raised an eyebrow, glaring up at her. “About time.”

“Nice to see you too, Dean.”

“So what? You just vanish for days on end? That’s how this works now? You know there’s a war on, Farrah.”

“Oh, calm down, why don’t you? I’m _fine_. I’m a big girl; I can take care of myself. Besides, there’s hardly war worth speaking of just because your prophet with no practical experience under his belt says that there is. Don’t you forget where I came from, Dean Winchester. There’s a war when _I_ say there’s a war.”

“There’s always a war on,” Sam scoffed. “Welcome to hunting.”

“You lot are so dramatic,” she hissed. “Come on, lighten up a bit. So Heaven and Hell are bound to be on our trails by now. We took down an entire regime only two weeks ago, remember? I think we can handle our two targets just fine. Besides, this place is supernaturally fortified, is it not? And it’s warded? It’ll take ages for them to find us here.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it,” Dean countered. “The angels and the demons obviously know this place exists, or Hunter wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Fine. So they know where we are—for now. Look, I haven’t made it my place to live here; I come and go as needed. No one sent me a line, so I assumed I wasn’t needed. So I didn’t come. It’s as simple as that. You want me around? Say something. I’m not complicated. I keep my distance because that’s simply how I work, but I can be flexible.”

“Enlighten us, please. What have you been up to ‘keeping your distance’?”

“If you think I haven’t been trying to help from afar, we seriously need to reconsider our relationship. We’re a _team_ , Dean Winchester; I’ve been _trying_ to settle some things for you people. Again—you want me around? Drop a line.”

“That’s not good enough. Ask Cas—we don’t tend to take kindly to people vanishing for days without a word of communication.”

“See—there, that’s what I’ve been trying to fix.”

“Excuse me?”

“The communication. As I assume you know, I can’t connect to angelic frequencies on this side of the rift.”

“How does that affect us?”

“How does tha—are you daft? It should be obvious. If your word is anything to go on, the angels aren’t Castiel’s friends; that’s all well and good until we need information. If I can get myself onto their radio and into their circles, I can double-cross. Easy as that.”

“And?”

“So far it’s been a bust,” she sighed.

This was only partially true.

Farrah _had_ been out trying to link herself to angel radio, and it _had_ been going poorly. For awhile. By the time she’d gotten back to the Winchesters’ bunker, she had it all figured out.

As it stood, Farrah’s vessel was nearly vibrating with celestial energy. It wasn’t that she herself was so powerful; she’d given herself a boost. She now had not just her own grace coursing through her veins.

Two days before showing back up at the bunker, Farrah had had the thought. Perhaps angel radio was connected to angelic grace; perhaps she couldn’t connect because her grace wasn’t forged here—it wasn’t insanity. Angelic grace was crucial to the celestial. She didn’t find it too much of a stretch to assume it did more than give one her wings.

She had been bouncing around from city to city, hoping to cross paths with an angel. She had known she was able to fly up to Heaven anytime she wished, but she wanted to avoid using the surprise tactic at any cost. Besides, appearing in Heaven would alert the masses of her presence; if she truly needed to steal grace to establish her line, the last thing she needed was all of angelkind on her trail for murder.

When she finally found her first target, she was in Philadelphia. She sat in a park, eyeing the people as they carried out their leisurely activities. While everyone around her was relaxed, she was tense; she could sense the celestial energy. Somewhere nearby was the angelic grace she so desperately craved—the solution to her problem. Potentially.

After pacing the park twice, she finally sourced the angel; he possessed the body of a young adult male. And he was, thankfully, alone.

Farrah approached him with a friendly grin. “Hello, sir.”

He narrowed his eyes but entertained her conversation in spite of his confusion. “Hello,” he responded stiffly, though he was evidently trying not to be.

“Don’t be so nervous,” she replied coolly. “I’m a friend.”

“Do we know each other?”

“Now we do.”

He inclined his chin. “How can that be if I do not know your name?”

“It’s Farrah,” she informed. “My name is Farrah.”

“Noah.”

“There, see? We have met. I am a friend.”

“What do you need, Farrah?”

“You are an angel.”

“Is that—are you flirting with me?”

“Noah, please don’t play dumb with me.”

“I’m not.”

“I can sense your grace, Noah. I know you sense mine too.”

“We need to go somewhere more private to have this conversation,” he replied shortly.

“Anywhere you’d like,” she complied.

“I’ve got a little apartment in the city,” he told her.

“Perfect.”

Noah gave her the address, though he was still evidently skeptical of her. “Do we travel together? Or meet up there?”

“I’d say together,” she answered. She put her hand on his shoulder and flew them there, clearly catching him off guard.

“How—who are you?”

“I’ve already told you, Noah. My name is Farrah. What’s got you so shaken up all of the sudden?” she asked, knowing fully what his answer would be.

“You have wings.”

“Of course I have wings. I am an angel. You have wings, Noah; don’t discredit yourself like that.” She gave him a small pat on the shoulder. He aggressively shoved her hand away, taking a step back and breathing heavier now.

“What the hell is going on? Sure, I have wings. But it’s not like they actually _work_. Yours should have been damaged in the fall too. What’s the deal?”

“The deal is that where I’m from the angels haven’t fallen, honey.”

“You’re mad.”

“Noah, I know you can sense that I have grace. And I know you know I can fly. So I invite you to consider that maybe things are exactly as they seem.”

“That’s impossible.”

“We don’t live in a universe, Noah.”

“I’m starting to get that.”

“Don’t be afraid of me. I told you before; I’m a friend.”

“What is it that you need me for?”

“I’ve come to test a theory,” she replied.

“What theory?”

“I’ve been unable to connect myself to angel radio since crossing to this dimension.”

“Is that so?”

“Unfortunately, it is,” she sighed.

“And you expect me to help you with that?”

“I’m operating on a hunch.”

“Right. A hunch. What hunch exactly?”

“I’ve been racking my brain for… quite some time now trying to come up with a solution, but nothing seems to do the trick. Then I started thinking that maybe it’s got to do with my grace,” she explained, still calm.

“Your grace?”

“It’s not… tuned in, I suppose. I doesn’t operate on the right frequencies.”

“I’m not following.”

“Stop interrupting, Noah; I’m getting there,” she hissed. “I was thinking—maybe the communication frequencies are hardwired in our graces.”

“That’s entirely possible.”

“Glad someone agrees.”

“But I still don’t see how you expect me to help with this. I’m not anyone special, Farrah; I’m about as average as an angel can get.”

“You’ll do just fine, Noah. You aren’t playing a complicated role.”

“What is my role, Farrah? You haven’t really explained anything.”

“I told you my whole predicament.”

“Not the part that pertains to me—which is what I’ve been _trying_ to get out of you the whole time.”

“Right,” she breathed. “Of course. Skip the exposition; jump straight into the action. Bloody angels.”

“Are we done here?”

“Don’t you want to know your part?”

“I get it. You’re here to waste my time. You’re lonely and desperate and on the wrong side of reality.”

“Cold,” she scoffed. “Let’s just jump to the last page of the book then, if that will settle you down some.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me for anything, Noah. It’s me that ought to be thanking you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

After he asked, she’d taken her angel blade from her jacket and cut deep into Noah’s throat, eyeing the glistening blue-white inside.

She took a vial from her pocket; ever since she’d set out to find an angel’s grace to steal, she’d carried the vial around with her to collect the grace once she’d come across it. The time had finally come to put it to use.

She held the vial underneath the laceration and gently gestured the light into the opening. Once she’d drained it, she healed Noah’s throat wound and slipped the grace back into her pocket, putting her blade back inside her jacket.

Noah was not dead; that was the entire purpose of healing him, after all. However, though he was living, he was certainly not grateful. He was snarling at her, his eyes dark slits full of rage and his hands both clenched into fists.

“See, Noah? A friend helping out a friend?”

“Heaven’s going to strike you down for this.”

“Heaven should only give a damn if I begin to slaughter their angels,” she replied nonchalantly. She reached out and adjusted Noah’s jacket for him. “You’re not dead, my dear. You’re simply human. Very different.”

“You think Heaven will take kindly to thievery?”

“I think Heaven should be none the wiser. You know, as you’re now human, if I kill you it won’t register upstairs the same way as it would have before. Have I erred in leaving you alive, Noah?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless of where you leave me, Farrah, Heaven _will_ descend upon you. You’re an angel. You know how they function.”

“Thank you for the donation, Noah.”

“I suggest you leave.”

“Not without a parting gift,” she replied. “I’d like to not leave you angry.”

“What could you possibly do to reconcile this, Farrah?”

“Easy,” she scoffed. She wrapped her hands around Noah’s neck and snapped it with a clean twist. “I’ve changed my mind about letting you off,” she said to the now-corpse as she laid it on the ground.

Afterwards, she’d ingested the grace. And it had done exactly what she had hoped it would.

Still, when Castiel asked about developments, she had insisted that there were “Absolutely none.”

“If you need assistance, I’m an angel too.”

“As I’m aware.”

“Although, frankly, I’m not exactly sure how the radio works. I know how to use it, but that’s as much as I have.”

“It’s the same with most angels, it seems,” Farrah scoffed. “Really, Castiel. If I need the help, I’ll take you up on the offer. You’d be better off keeping an eye on the Nephilim or the prophet than on me. _They’re_ the ones everyone’s after.”

“Whatever you say.”

She fully intended to tell the group about her development. After all, she’d initially— _initially_ —done it for their sakes. Her plan was to provide intel to them to help protect the Nephilim, nothing more and nothing less. However, she didn’t know how to go about that without creating conflict. She knew there was no getting around the stolen grace; there would be questions. She didn't think her own questionable decisions needed to detract from the real issues at hand. So, for the time being, she opted to keep it all to herself.

Good intentions and whatever else.


	5. Karma's Been Kicking Us in the Teeth Lately

Farrah remained at the bunker following stealing Noah’s grace. She kept telling herself it was to ease the Winchesters’ nerves; they hadn’t taken kindly to her extended absence, so she figured her best option was to stick around until she was instructed otherwise. Still, she knew that was only halfway true—something that was beginning to become a pattern with her, it seemed. Stashing herself away in the bunker, surrounded by bodyguards as well, was one hell of a way to protect herself from the potential wrath of Heaven, should they be on her case for her crime. She wasn’t sure that was the case, but she decided it best to not take the chance. As it happened, her presence in the bunker was achieving both goals, so she rationalized it.

She decided to take the opportunity to interact with the new prophet. She hadn’t been around before to get anything out of him, so she decided while they dwelled in the same bunker, the least they could do was communicate. After all, communication had been her Big Endgame Number One since crossing the rift. It only made sense to establish as many lines as she could—between herself and her companions and between herself and her adversaries. As of then, she wasn’t quite sure how she viewed the prophet; he was, after all, a new addition—and freshly pulled from the furnace, as it was. Still, she erred on the side of trust; the Winchesters had kept him around, so clearly he wasn’t offending.

She finally caught him alone one evening. She had been pacing the bunker, as she was so apt during typical resting hours when the bunker was dormant, and he crossed her path on his way to get a cup of water to try and cure his incessant insomnia.

“Your name is Hunter, yes?” she asked him cordially.

He nodded shortly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Highly apropos, I would say,” she joked. She noticed he didn’t take her bait, and she straightened her posture. “Mine is Farrah, in case you hadn’t heard,” she introduced, using a more formal voice this time around, hoping to legitimize the conversation a bit more. His stance remained unchanged, and he remained distant—she could tell that much without him even moving a muscle or breathing a word. Humans could be so easily read.

“I’d heard.”

“We haven’t had the pleasure,” she said.

“Yes, we have. When you bound me.”

“Well, that hardly counts,” she scoffed. “Look—we’re in the same boat. Let’s try and start off on a better foot, shall we? I’ll admit my first impression has been less than desirable.”

“That’s a phrase.”

“Are you this hostile towards Sam and Dean? Towards Castiel? They each had a hand in that first impression. Surely you haven’t acted like a child for such a long time.”

“I’ve had a chance to warm up to them. You’re new.”

“I’m a friend,” she said, ignoring the fact that she’d told the same thing to Noah before stabbing him in the back.

“I assume so. They’ve mentioned you a few times.”

“Then why so guarded?”

“Because, for one, I don’t actually know you, ma’am. The Winchesters and the other angel are already on relatively thin ice; their word ain’t the be-all, end-all for me. Also, they’re not very thrilled with how you’ve been acting.”

“Oh, please. That drama’s _days_ old, now. Surely they’ve given it a rest.”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed. “Their problem was my absence; now I spend all my hours here, and they _still_ have a problem.”

“They don’t seem very trusting.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Imprisonment in Hell can do that to a prophet.”

“Dually noted,” she acknowledged. “Well, in any case, hopefully we can get over this barrier eventually. After all, it’d make living together considerably more tolerable if we could all sing Kumbaya around the fire and not have to fake our comradery to get through it.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a thudding in the front room. They met eyes for a second before reacting. Hunter made to run out to investigate, but, impatient as she was, Farrah took his shoulder and flew both there in an instant.

“What the _hell_?” he exclaimed upon arrival.

“Shut up,” she commanded. “Thank me later.”

The room was dark; she noticed the light was turned on, but, as it had been ripped from the plug and shattered, it produced no luminescence. There was dead silence.

“Hunter,” she beckoned.

“Yes, ma’am?” he replied, less antagonistic than before.

“I’m going to shed some light on the place. Do us both a favor and have a look around, why don’t you? I can’t do both simultaneously; it’s complicated.”

“Sure thing.”

She tensed her vessel, illuminating the room by casting her wings. The holy light from her halo was enough to brighten it almost too much.

She held her position, her brilliant wings stretching nearly wall to wall, as Hunter looked about for signs, other than the deactivated lamp, of course.

“Ma’am,” he beckoned, now at the top of the stairs. “The door’s open.”

“What?” she asked. She put her wings away and quickly sided him at the door. “I’ll be damned,” she scoffed. “There’s been a break-in. Or a break-out. Either way, it’s not ideal.”

“I thought this place was fortified.”

“It is. But when has that ever stopped anyone?”

“One would think it would stop… most everyone.”

“Then one would be wrong; plenty of things could have blasted through that door. The only thing I can rule out for near certain is a demon; they would have teleported.”

“So what are you thinking, ma’am?”

“Rough estimate? Either an angel or a witch.”

“But why? What would they be after?”

“You know,” she scoffed. “Everyone’s just _dying_ to get their dirty little paws on that Nephilim. My money’s on Jack.”

“What do we do?”

“Personally, I’m surprised the commotion didn’t wake the Winchesters,” she remarked crossing her arms.

“It did,” Dean assured, entering the scene flanked by Sam and Mary.

Castiel appeared shortly after. “Jack’s room is vacant.”

“Well, isn’t that perfect?” Farrah said with a roll of her eyes. She took Hunter by the shoulder again and flew them down the stairs to put them in front of the rest of the group. She gestured to the door with a nod of her head. “Door’s open.”

“So it’s not demons,” Dean deduced.

“That’s as far as I got too,” Farrah sighed.

“I would assume he didn’t leave on his own volition,” Castiel added matter-of-factly. “Given the apparent struggle.”

“That much is obvious, Castiel.”

“Forgive me for trying.”

“Is it too much to ask to catch a break around here?” she breathed. “Are you lot consistently this unlucky, or is this anomalous?”

“It’s about average.”

“I chose the right crowd,” she snarked.

“Hilarious,” Dean growled.

She rolled her eyes. “Alright, alright. Back to business; although, frankly, I’m not sure how you expect us to get anything done when we have no idea what happened.”

“We figure it out.”

“Welcome to the life, Hunter.”

§§§§§

In Farrah’s home timeline, the angels had successfully located Metatron. It hadn’t taken them too terribly long—roughly two days after Hannah put her flock of angels on the job. She had promised Raphael efficiency, after all.

“He’s in London,” she informed, standing stiff and proper in the control room before Lucifer and Raphael. “Or, what remains of London, I suppose. There’s not much left of it now.”

“Interesting,” Raphael noted. He was slowly pacing, helping himself to center his thoughts. He stopped and looked to Hannah. “Has anyone gone to fetch him?”

“Not as of yet,” she replied. “We’ve just found him. I figured it was best to let you know where we’d be deploying angels before sending them onto the ground. Dangerous times and all—never know who might be around.”

“Fair point,” he conceded. He resumed his pacing. “Send down a flight, would you?”

“How many, sir?”

“However many you think should go,” he replied coolly. “You’re a big girl, Hannah; have some autonomy.”

“Understood,” she said. “I’ll send some angels out immediately.”

“Yes, do that.”

She gave each man a short nod as her salutation before leaving. Raphael, upon her exit, stopped his pacing once again, now directing his attention to Lucifer.

“That’s one half down,” Lucifer said, airing what ought to be common knowledge.

“About those tablets,” Raphael said, directing attention to the missing piece of their puzzle. “How do we go about finding them?”

“You want the truth? I haven’t the faintest,” Lucifer replied with a half-amused chuckle. “I wasn’t available when they dug up the ones on my side.”

Raphael wasn’t in quite the playful mood Lucifer was. “Is that so?” he asked, his muscles tense. “Then how do you _presume_ we go about it?”

“Again, I haven’t the faintest,” Lucifer repeated. “You asking the same question in different ways won’t get you a new answer, Raphael. I simply do not know.”

Raphael rolled his eyes and started pacing again. “Then let’s try and think something up, shall we?”

“All I can tell you is, at least where I came from, the old man locked them away in the core of the Earth. He’s inconvenient like that. I assume something similar happened here.”

“Then we assemble another team to excavate the tablets.”

“And if they’re not there?”

“They’ll be there.”

“Right. Of course.”


	6. We Play by Our Own Rules

Hannah’s troop of angels brought Metatron into Heaven’s custody and was immediately deployed again—with some additional help—to excavate the Word(s) of God. Or, at the least, to try and locate them. Lucifer had, upon witnessing the scribe, realized that, perhaps, there was a way to make things easier on everyone, and so the angels sent to the surface had been instructed to hold off on actually exhuming anything until Hannah gave them the greenlight.

Hannah held Metatron’s hands behind his back, and all four—she, Metatron, Raphael, and Lucifer, that is—stood in Heaven’s Control Center. The scribe wasn’t putting up a fight; he’d insisted the entire time that he was more than willing to comply. Still, the archangels felt mistrust and decided it best to play the game safe anyway. Angels had gotten so crafty recently; best not to take chances anymore, what with the political climate in Heaven being as it was. However, they didn’t use unnecessary force. Raphael liked to believe himself the fairest of his brothers. Hannah’s grip on Metatron’s wrists was easy, just strong enough to keep him from resisting.

“Raphael,” he greeted with a polite nod. He looked Lucifer over once or twice with his eyes narrow. “You’re new.”

“Lucifer,” the devil replied coolly.

Metatron scoffed. He arched his eyebrow, his skepticism evident in his raised chin. “Right,” he said slowly. “Of course. And my name is Abraham.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “Of all of Father’s chosen people.”

“I always was fond of Abraham,” Metatron defended with a shrug. “When he almost killed Isaac—priceless entertainment. I can’t be the only one wishing Dad would have let him finish the job,” he chuckled.

“I can’t disagree there,” Lucifer conceded. “But, back to the point—no, I wasn’t lying. I understand that I’m Satan, so that might be counterintuitive, but I’m telling you the Dad’s-honest truth here, Metatron.”

“Sure. I’d be inclined to believe that if Lucifer weren’t dead.”

Lucifer sighed and turned to Raphael for a second. “We need to send out a mass memo or something; I’m tired of explaining this to people out of the loop.” He returned his attention to the scribe. “There’s this thing called a multiverse. We live in one.”

“I get that. I’m not _that_ behind. You and that child Castiel~ controlled Heaven for a short time,” Metatron recalled. “I may have been hiding, but I kept tabs.”

“So what’s the confusion?”

“It might be because Naomi told everyone Castiel~ had you offed,” Hannah suggested. “He wasn’t aware of Raphael’s disloyalty; he assumed you were out of play. I’d imagine quite a few angels think the same still. You haven’t been too interactive.”

“I interact.”

“Sure. With me. And with Bartholomew. And with Raphael,” she scoffed. “You haven’t spoken to a lesser angel since… well, up until now, I suppose.”

“I am not _lesser_ ,” Metatron interjected, offense in his voice. “Who put _you_ in charge, anyway?” he asked her, attempting to look at her but struggling given her position.

“Michael did. Castiel~ did. Lucifer did. Raphael did. It seems you’re not as caught up as you think you are. I’ve been commanding fleets for… quite a while now, Metatron.”

“Whatever,” he retorted, raising his chin proudly again. “I’m still the scribe of God.”

“Oh, please. Anyone could have done that.”

“Sort of like how almost any angel can command a few soldiers.”

“I’d like to see you do my job.”

“Honey, if Naomi—anti-social as she was—could do what she did, then your job can’t be too difficult.”

“Enough bickering,” Raphael interrupted.

“She started it,” Metatron insisted.

At the same time, Hannah had said, “He started it.”

Irritated, Raphael rolled his eyes and began to pace; he found it calmed him down, and he’d also found himself doing it quite often since taking the throne.

Hannah breathed before looking back to Lucifer and resuming their discussion. “In any case, you haven’t interacted much with anyone since Castiel~ and Naomi were running things. After she said you were off the board, that’s what the angels all went with. No one questioned Raphael—not even Castiel~ or Naomi. And since I’ve been your mouthpiece since you two came to power, there’s no real reason for anyone but me—and Bartholomew, since you operate Naomi’s position through him—to know you’re still kicking.”

“That’s going to need reconciled,” Lucifer noted to himself aloud. “Make sure you get that on the airwaves, Hannah.”

“Will do,” she assured. She nodded to the scribe. “Back to business?”

“About time,” Raphael sighed. He clapped his hands together and held them in prayer position as he stopped his pacing and turned to the group. “We didn’t bring the scribe up here for his witty commentary.”

“A damn shame,” Metatron sighed. “That’s what most people want me for nowadays.”

“We need information.”

“Shit, I lied. _That’s_ what most people want me for nowadays. The witty commentary is just a bonus.”

“That’s aside the point. Tell us about the tablets.”

“ _Those_ old things?”

Raphael nodded slowly. “Did I stutter?”

“Not sure what you want with God’s Word. It’s not the most thrilling read.”

“I’d say otherwise.”

“You didn’t write it down.”

“But you did. So you know what’s on it.”

“I may.”

“What did Father have to say about interdimensional travel?”

“He mentioned it a few times, but it wasn’t extensive.”

“Did He happen to espouse how one should go about it?”

“Depends on which tablet you read from. The angel one and the demon one have you covered. The leviathan one isn’t good for much of anything but handling the bastards.”

“So, theoretically, if one found the angel or the demon tablets and had them translated, he could figure out how to travel through the multiverse.”

“Theoretically and legitimately, yes,” Metatron confirmed.

“Interesting.”

“But He advises against it.”

“Does He now?”

Metatron nodded. “It’s unstable—the spell _and_ the multiverse.”

“How so?”

“Think of it like a house of cards—each dimension is a separate playing card. You throw one out of whack, the whole damn construct comes crashing down.”

“So, theoretically again, if one found the angel or demon tablets, had them translated, and then travelled through the multiverse, he should err on the side of caution?”

“Personally, I would say erring on the side of caution implies limiting the interdimensional vacations to precisely zero.”

“And if that’s off the table?”

“I find it hard to believe there’s a scenario where one would absolutely _need_ to take a trip outside the dimension, Raphael.”

“Too bad it’s not your place to make that kind of call, Metatron.”

The scribe sighed, pursing his lips. “Yes. You can travel through spacetime. But you ought to be damn careful about it.”

“There goes the plan to completely destroy the fabric of the multiverse,” Lucifer sighed, shaking his head.

“You’re unhelpful,” Hannah chastised, though she was evidently amused given the expression she wore.

Lucifer smirked. “It’s a gift.”

Raphael was satisfied with the responses Metatron had for him. Before Lucifer and Hannah could start up their sidetracking once again, he cut them short and said to Hannah “Get those angels to start excavating tablets.”

She nodded. Before she left, she looked back to Metatron. “You wouldn’t happen to know where we could find the angel tablet or the demon tablet, do you?”

“Last I heard, the demon tablet was under Jerusalem, the leviathan tablet was under Iran, and the angel tablet was beneath Australia. Can’t tell you anything more specific than that, though. I wasn’t there when God had them buried; I just heard roughly where He planned to stash them when He was sorting it out. But the Words were finished by then, so I was gone pretty soon after. He had a garrison including some other angels bury them for Him.”

“It’s a start,” she assured. “Rather have to dig up the entirety of Australia than the entirety of the planet, after all.”

“I still strongly advise against this plan,” he replied, now looking between all three of his captors with pursed lips.

“We heard the first few times, Metatron,” Raphael sighed.

“We just chose to ignore you,” Lucifer added with a shrug.

“I gather that. But I thought maybe—since you were so interested in what I had to say that you had me brought up here—you might want to know,” the scribe replied shortly. “I understand that I was wrong; it doesn’t change my warning.”

“We brought you up here for very specific information, Metatron. We _didn’t_ bring you up here to heed your command.”

“That would be why I’m not making commands. Merely suggestions.”

“We didn’t bring you up here for that either.”

“Understood.”

“Hannah,” Raphael said. “Give those angels their signal, and get the scribe back to London. He’s exhausted his use.”

“So merciful. Castiel~ would have my head rolling by now,” Metatron scoffed.

“Well, neither of us are Castiel~. He was… considerably more unstable than I like to think any of the three of us are. Same goes for Naomi.”

“Incredible. The great Castiel~ less stable than the devil.”

“I’d hardly call him ‘great,’”, Hannah snarled. “Besides, what good are you to us dead? For all we know, you _haven’t_ exhausted your usefulness. It’d be a shame to off you so soon only to find out we need you later on down the road.”

“So proactive,” Metatron remarked with mock adoration. “I’m impressed—and that’s, mostly, not sarcastic. You lot are, surprisingly enough, the most competent hands Heaven’s had on her steering wheel since Daddy left.”

“We’d like to believe so.”

“Hannah, stop stalling. We can all chat later,” Raphael commanded. He began to pace once more, eyeing Hannah and Metatron contemplatively.

“I’m on it,” Hannah obliged. She took Metatron back to London, leaving Raphael and Lucifer once again on their own in the Control Center.

“While the angels Hannah sent get to work on their scavenger hunt, I propose we let the rest of Heaven know just who’s running things. It’s about time,” Lucifer suggested, recalling what Hannah had said about his assumed death. “My ego doesn’t like the thought of my subordinates thinking _Castiel~_ really did me in.”

“Whatever pleases you, Lucifer. You can make your own calls without running them through me all the time.”

“I assumed this was a dictatorship with some assistance.”

“It’s more like an oligarchy. I think Heaven’s had quite enough of the dictatorships. The two don’t seem to blend.”

Lucifer smirked. “Noted.”


	7. You Draped Yourself in the Flag of Heaven

“I’m going to Heaven,” Farrah announced. The group had been racking their brains for a day or so after Jack went missing, and nothing was coming of it. “Seeing as one of the possibilities here is that the angels got to him.”

“Great. I’ll come with you,” Castiel replied, getting to his feet. He had been sitting around the table with the humans; Farrah stood over them with her arms folded dismissively and her chin on an incline.

“Sit down, Castiel,” she requested. “I’ll go myself.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

“You’ll hold me back. I know they don’t like you up there. I’d rather just go on my own and not have to worry about whether or not they decide to take you off the board.”

He sighed. “Fine,” he conceded.

“Plus, I have another agenda. I want to try and use a trip to Heaven to sort out this angel radio mess. I feel like they’ll be a lot more willing to help me if they don’t know I’m helping Public Enemy Number One hide a Nephilim.” In reality, while this was part of her reason for refusing Castiel’s assistance, she figured if she went alone she could use this as her alibi and could _finally_ let the group know she’d gotten herself wired to the radio without putting them all up-in-arms about what she’d done to Noah to make that happen.

“Number Two. Lucifer’s Number One.”

“Lucifer’s dead, C. Which makes you Number One. Congratulations. You’re really moving up in the world.”

He rolled his eyes and sat back down, propping his elbows up on the table. “In the meantime, what do we do? Sit around and wait for your word?”

“If that’s what you want, I suppose,” she replied with a shrug.

“We need to work on our other possibilities,” Sam interrupted.

“Right. We’re not sure Jack was taken by the angels. It could easily have been witches. Or… something else, even,” Mary reminded.

“What would a witch want with a Nephilim?” Castiel asked.

“Not sure.”

“See? You have your hands full down here anyway. I can take care of Heaven. Besides, double-crossing is sort of a specialty of mine,” Farrah informed.

“Is it?” Dean asked, tilting his head to the side.

“Relax, Dean Winchester; I’m not double-crossing _you_. A girl learns some skills working under Michael. In any case, ideally I’d be double-crossing Heaven. You know, gaining their trust and their information so I can pass it on to you lot. That sounds helpful to me.”

Dean pursed his lips, but he didn’t object. He decided it was best to drop the animosity; after all, she was clearly on their side, and she had been for quite awhile now. Regardless of the bizarre feeling in Dean’s gut, he knew she was an ally of theirs. But perhaps it was better to keep her at arm’s length. One could never be to cautious when working with angels. “Sounds like a plan,” he told her. He cleared his throat and directed his attention to the group around the table.

“I shan’t be too long. At least I hope not,” she said. She brushed off her sleeves and straightened out her clothes before giving the rest of the group a wave and a smile and heading on upstairs.

It had been a little while since she’d been to Heaven on a mission to gain trust. The last few times she’d gone up there, it had been either captivity or rebellion. She looked around at the Heaven on this side of the rift. It was more pristine than the one she knew, with its hallways made of glittering white walls and floors and sleek chrome. The one she’d worked in was dimmer; Michael liked a darker ambience. Here was a true Heaven’s Heaven—the kind Christians imagine Heaven to look like, though with considerably less gold. This is what she thought, personally, a Heaven should look like; she’d tried to convince Michael to change it up.

She made her way purposefully through the hallways, though she wasn’t quite certain where she was headed. The Heaven back home was simply laid-out and decorated with signs giving the angels directions. Here, there was nothing but seemingly endless numbers of identical hallways and nothing telling her where she was save for the names posted above the doors.

As far as she could deduce, she was nowhere helpful. She seemed to be in the connections between the individual Heavens of dead souls. If this Heaven were anything like hers (which, of course, she had no indication that it was), then she was quite separated from the operational sect. She eyed the names on each Heaven. After reading them, she paused and furrowed her brows, standing before one of the doors now. “I don’t believe it,” she said to herself. She recognized the name from her homeland; it was that of an ally—Robert Singer. She narrowed her eyes, noting the different dates above each door. 1920-1945. 1932-2004. 1935-1990. 1948-2017. 1950-2012. If she were twice as bold, she may have burst into each of them to find her comrade’s deceased dimensional counterpart. But she refrained for a few reasons.

1\. She was on a mission. She needed to reign herself in and focus. She came to Heaven for one reason and one reason only.

2\. There was no way of knowing, until she barged in, which Bobby Singer was the correct Bobby Singer. She didn’t, after all, know his date of birth (or, as far as this side was concerned, his date of death). It would take far too long to search him out, and, due to reason Number One, she didn’t have time on her side.

3\. The last thing she needed, given reason Number One, was to create disruption and immediately put the angels she desperately sought help from on the offensive before introducing herself.

4\. She didn’t actually _know_ this Robert Singer. What was she to say should they meet? It was pointless.

She cleared her throat to re-center her focus on the task she’d brought on herself. She needed to find an angel, and she, most likely, wasn’t going to achieve that if she was trapped in a maze of personal Heavens to Bobby Singer.

She walked down the hall at a faster pace now than she’d originally used before realizing where she was. She looked around herself impatiently. The hallway seemed to go on for eternity. “How many people can be named Robert Singer?” she asked herself irritably. “Some creativity wouldn’t kill them. It’d certainly make _my_ life easier.”

She decided instead she’d fly somewhere else. She could see the end of the hallway, though it would have been a lengthy walk. With a relieved yet aggravated sigh, she flew to the end and was met with an intersection. She had two choices, and each looked exactly the same. She was beginning to find it incredible that the angels here could get anything done at all if they worked in such a confusing maze where everything looked identical. Without any real reason behind it, she opted to go to the right. At that point, all she wanted was to find someone who could help her.

It seemed she ended up in nothing more than a connector pathway. Every now and then as she made her way down, she would come across another hallway that lead to another collection of Heavens for another set of people. She was beginning to figure out her bearings, to a degree, and decided, knowing generally what she would find at either end of the hallway and knowing this hallway was most likely her way out of the individual sectors, to fly down to the end of the path and see where she would wind up.

Nowhere helpful, it would turn out. She had actually managed to go backwards, and was now simply at the beginning of the alphabet. Put off but still persistent, she rolled her eyes and flew the entire way to the other end of the hallway, where she was met with something a little more useful—a crossroads. And, she noted, the floor was now a slightly different color. It had gone from the bright white to which she’d grown accustomed to a very slight pastel blue. She assumed that was a good sign that marked the end of the personal Heavens and the beginning of the managerial locales that she needed to find.

Going right the first time hadn’t helped her, so here she decided to take a left. She heard talking after a short time travelling the new direction that served to solidify her decision. She was unsure who it was or where she was, but she assumed, since there seemed to be angels around, that she found where she needed to be.

Eventually, she crossed paths with another angel—finally.

The other angel was taken aback. As per usual, he could see her true face and she his, but neither had ever seen one another before. “Hello?” he greeted hesitantly, eyeing her over. “Where are you from? I didn’t know they let the underlings in these parts.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, I’ve never seen you before. I assume you must work below me with the other… less-than-stellar models.”

“Aren’t you charming?”

“Who are you to speak to me this way?”

“My name’s Farrah.”

“I just talked to Farrah. You’re not her.”

“It’s a long story… What’s your name again?”

“It’s not of import.”

“Mine was.”

“You’re the foreigner.”

“In any case, I’m not lying. My name is Farrah.”

“Right,” he scoffed. He turned around and called down the hallway, “Farrah, could you come here, please?”

“I’ll be right out,” was the response from the end of the hall. Farrah, from the alternate dimension, was prepared to hear her own voice and was rather shocked when the reply came from another.

After a moment or two, another angel appeared. She approached the male angel calmly with a gentle smile on her face. “See? _This_ is Farrah.” (For clarity’s sake, as the secondary Castiel was Castiel~, this Farrah will henceforth be Farrah~).

“How can I help, Joseph?” Farrah~ asked coolly.

“Joseph? That’s who you are? You could have just said,” Farrah scoffed.

Farrah~ turned to Farrah. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she greeted, still wearing her polite grin. She extended a hand. “Farrah~.”

Farrah accepted it. “Farrah.”

Now there was a short pause before Farrah~ turned back to Joseph. “Is there something wrong with her?”

“I’m not sure she belongs up here,” Joseph replied dryly. “I think she’s a subordinate that’s gotten… too bold for her standing.”

“Let me explain,” Farrah scoffed, irritated with the both of them now. “I’m being honest; my name is Farrah. I’m an angel. I served under Michael, for a time, and—”

“Excuse me?” Joseph interjected.

“If you’ll let me finish, you’d understand. Now, I’m not from your dimension. I assume you know about the Nephilim?”

“Everyone knows about the Nephilim.”

“Right. Did you know about the hole in reality that was created when he was born?”

Farrah~ and Joseph met eyes for a second before Farrah~ looked back to her counterpart and shook her head. “No, actually. Go on.”

“I’m from the other side of it,” Farrah explained. She gestured to Farrah~. “I’m _you_ , but from another timeline. If that makes any sense at all.”

“Say this is true. What are you here for?”

“Depends. Are you asking about why I’m on this side of the fence, or are you asking why I’m in your Heaven?”

“Both,” Joseph replied, less amicable than Farrah~.

“I’m on your side of the rift because mine has been locked in biblical warfare since the Apocalypse, and I’m beginning to believe it might be eternal. It’s unpleasant; if either of you were in that position, you’d jump at the chance to leave as well. As for your Heaven, I’m here for some… assistance, I suppose. I figured, being an angel, I should insert myself into Heavenly affairs, yes? That’s what we’re made to do, after all. But I’ve had some trouble connecting to your frequencies. I figured I can hardly help you lot out if I can’t efficiently send or receive information. And I think I finally figured out the issue, but now I just need to confirm it and introduce myself. I’m on your side of the Nephilim debate, I assure you. The kid is an abomination.”

“Interesting,” Joseph remarked. He seemed less put-off.

“In that case, you should find Anael—go to the next intersection, take a left, and hers is the first door on the right. She’ll be able to help you find your footing around our Heaven,” Farrah~ informed.

Farrah scoffed. “Anael? It’s strange to hear someone refer me to Anael. Where I’m from, she’s nothing but a number-cruncher.”

“She’s got some sway in these parts. After Hannah was killed, we didn’t have a leader _again_ , and Anael asserted herself. She’s an excellent businesswoman, as it turns out. Tell her your story and your qualifications, and I’m sure she could put you in the right place.”

“I should mention—I’m very firmly in the Winchesters’ circle of trust.”

“Excuse me?”

“We had an alliance. It’s what, ultimately, got me onto this side of the rift.”

“And Castiel?”

“He trusts me too.”

“Good.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s nice to have an inside woman for a change.”

“Right, of course.”

“Clearly you’re devoted to Heaven if you’d come all the way up here and let us know all of this so willingly. I do believe we can trust you, Farrah.”

“I do believe that as well, Farrah~.”

“In that case, you ought to bring that up to Anael. She’ll definitely want to know about any potential sources of information. Especially if it’s one that can keep tabs on Sam, Dean, Castiel, or the Nephilim.”

“Lucky for Anael I’m connected to all four.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know what’s become of that kid?”

“Pardon?”

“He’s seemed to drop off the grid. We’re not sure where he’s gone. It was like he suddenly reemerged and then promptly vanished again.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got nothing on that. I was under the impression I’d find him here, actually. But, since everyone’s got it out for that boy, I’m sure I could hitch a ride with the Winchesters and use them to help me hunt him down. Something of the like.”

“Talk to Anael.”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” Farrah assured. “It was my pleasure to meet the two of you,” she added before heading off down the hallway. Before either Farrah~ or Joseph could get in another word, Farrah had flown to the crossroads her double had spoken of, leaving both of the grounded angels absolutely mesmerized.

The door was easy enough to spot. It was glistening in gold with _Anael_ written in silver across the top. Apparently, the woman in power liked her luxuries. Farrah cleared her throat, as was per usual before doing anything such as this, and knocked on the door three times before stepping back and readjusting her clothing.

The door opened rather promptly, and Farrah was greeted with pursed lips and a raised eyebrow. Anael crossed her arms and looked Farrah up and down before their eyes met and she said, “Who might you be?”

“It’s a long story, but my name is Farrah. A second Farrah. I’m from a different timeline; the Nephilim opened a rift, and I crossed over to this side. Joseph and Farr—my double—told me I should seek you out.”

“Did they now?”

Farrah, too, crossed her arms. If Anael was going to have an attitude, so was she. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I told them I was looking to team up with the lot of you. I have sources I think you might be interested in. And, if I do say so myself, I am highly qualified. I worked under the reigning archangel Michael back home.” She decided to leave out the mutiny and the banishment, figuring neither would increase Anael’s trust.

“And what would those sources be?”

“I’m connected to the Winchesters, actually. They’re the reason I’m on this side of the dimensional gap. Them, and to Castiel.”

“Are you now?”

“I have no reason to lie, Anael.”

“Forgive me. I’m a skeptic. But if you’re telling the truth, we could definitely use any help we could get around here.”

“With the Nephilim?”

“Naturally. We have an angel or two undercover in Hell, but it’d be good to have someone in touch with those damned Winchesters and our fugitive Castiel.”

“In that case, I’m your girl. Here—hint number one, to prove my loyalty: they’ve got the current prophet.”

“I thought he was down in Hell.”

“He was. But now he’s topside and lodging with Sam, Dean, and Mary. And, of course, me and Castiel.”

“Very interesting. Thank you, Farrah.”

“Much obliged, Anael. As I said, I want to prove my loyalty. I understand if there are doubts as of now, but I hope in the near future you’ll see they’re unfounded.”

“If your tip about the prophet turns up legitimate, we’ll see about bringing you in full-time. Does that sound like a plan?”

“I can’t wait.”

“Good. In the meantime, you ought to be getting back to your residence with those boys. We know them too well at this point; too much longer, and they may become suspicious of your whereabouts. We can’t risk giving you away one minute out of the gate.”

“Right, of course. It’s been an honor, truly.”

“I’m sure it has. Good day, Farrah. We’ll drop you a line through the frequencies if we need you for anything.”

“Great.”

“And, if you don’t mind, we will be referring to you as Anna. The original is dead, and we cannot conveniently have two Farrahs with two completely different positions running about. It’ll confuse the other angels. So assume her name; it’s similar to your own.”

“Anna. Right.”

“Get to work, Anna.”

“As you wish, Anael. Again, it’s my honor.”

“As I’m sure it is.”

With that, Anael stepped back into her room and shut the door, leaving Farrah on her own once again, her mind absolutely racing. So many developments, so little time.


	8. I Choose to Go Down Swinging

Farrah’s alibi had worked for her. The Winchesters and Co. took at face-value her explanation that another angel upstairs had helped her to sort things out. “One of the Intelligence prodigies,” she’d told them. They knew everything else legitimately—her role in Heaven, what the angels were after, who was in charge. She was up front with her comrades about everything else, as was in everyone’s best interest. So what if they didn’t know she connected to angelic frequencies via stolen grace? That didn’t harm anything. However, not being aware who was leading the fight against them? That could be of more consequence. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Everything was absolutely under control.

Since then, she’d been up to Heaven a few times. She and the group on Earth had worked out very specific details for her to tip the angels off to; they were truths, so as not to raise suspicions, but they were chosen precisely because they wouldn’t be particularly helpful, whether or not they sounded as if they would. Together, they all managed to keep Farrah in her increasingly powerful post in Heaven whilst avoiding conflict with the angels.

It was about time something went accordingly.

Anael, grateful for what she perceived as Farrah’s diligent work on the floor, grew ever more trusting of the newcomer with each passing moment. Eventually, she began to tell Farrah Heaven’s classified information—compromising classified information.

Naturally, she brought that directly to the Winchesters.

“They plan to raise Michael from the Cage. I’m not completely sure what that means because, obviously, I wasn’t present for the build-up, but that’s the goal. Anael says they’re just struggling to figure out a way in.”

“First off, Michael’s been in the Cage for nearly a decade now. Last I heard, he was pretty… out of it. I don’t understand how he’d be useful,” Castiel remarked. His head tilted to the side as he thought the plan over.

Farrah shrugged. “Hell if I know. I don’t have the backstory or the details. I just know the endgame.”

“It’s a start,” Mary assured. “At least we know what they’re aiming to do.”

“I know nothing of your Michael, but I assume from mine we need to prevent this from happening?”

“Ideally.”

“Right. Sounds easy enough. At least right now. As far as I know, they have no idea how they’re going to pull it off. Like I said—they can’t open the Cage in the first place. And if he’s as jacked as you say he is, that adds some extra time to the process. We’ll be fine. Everything will be perfectly fine,” she insisted, more to assure herself than anyone else.

“Did Anael say what they wanted with Michael?” Castiel asked.

“Leadership. It was Anael’s idea in the first place. As flattered as she is by the popularity, she’s not one for management. She said she’d rather be a second-hand to a strong leader than be the leader herself. So she figured if they could bring Michael back into the picture, that’d solve that. Not to mention getting Heaven the upper hand. Hell has nothing on an archangel.”

“It might have something on a _broken_ archangel.”

“Right. Sure. Either way, it doesn’t seem like an immediate threat, if I’m honest. Just something to keep in mind. They have about as much as we do, which, clearly, isn’t much. It’s just something they’re looking into.”

“At least we can be ahead of the curb then.”

“Exactly. I say we keep focusing on the Nephilim, but just, you know, keep an eye out for any archangel business.”

“And? Where do we _start_ with Jack? He’s been missing for a few days now; so far, we’ve gotten precisely nowhere,” Dean interjected.

“Heaven’s gotten precisely nowhere as well.”

“And Hell?”

“Can’t help you there.”

“Did I ask you?”

“Context matters, Dean Winchester.”

“I haven’t heard anything from Hell since they left me here,” Hunter interrupted, assuming Dean was questioning him.

“We have something on someone,” Farrah reminded. “Sure, it’s not _everything_ , but it’s more than Heaven _wants_ you to have.”

“Yeah, but it’s not related to Jack,” Sam countered. “If we’re focused on finding him, we need information on _him_.”

“Right, I get that. Sorry I can’t be of more use. But I _did_ inform you that Heaven’s made no progress with really either of its two goals, as far as I know. That should really tell you all you need to know, shouldn’t it?”

“If we’ve already ruled out demons, and the angels didn’t do it, then what happened to Jack?” Mary asked, crossing her arms. “I doubt he left on his own accord; he wouldn’t have needed to put up a fight.”

“That’s a very good question that I don’t have the answer for. Or anything remotely close to an answer for.”

“So there’s another team in play,” Hunter asserted.

“Evidently. But that doesn’t help us if we don’t know who it is.”

“ _Or_ we’re missing something. It could be angels working for Hell; Hunter—you said that was happening. Or maybe it’s someone else working on behalf of Hell. Either way, it’s the same three ‘teams,’ but one’s simply more innovative,” Castiel intuited.

“This is more complicated than it needs to be,” Farrah sighed. “I’ll head back up to Heaven and see what else I can dig up. I don’t particularly trust Anael. Maybe I’m missing something,” she said with a shrug before disappearing.

“In the meantime—Michael,” Mary said, redirecting their focus. “To get into the Cage, Heaven needs a witch, yeah?”

“Or Death himself,” Dean replied. “But he’s dead.”

“Excuse me?” Hunter asked with furrowed brows.

“It’s complicated. Anyway, yes, they need a witch. But the only one who could have done that was Rowena, who’s also dead.”

“Rowena?” Hunter queried, inclining his chin.

“Again, it’s complicated.”

“Describe her to me.”

“Red-hair. Feisty. High-maintenance. Scottish accent. Bit of a bitch.”

“I think I know who you’re talking about.”

“I highly doubt it. She died well before you came into the picture.”

“When was that?”

“May. 2017.”

“Strange. I remember hearing talk of a ‘Rowena MacLeod’ sometime around September.”

“The former King of Hell was her son. Wouldn’t be too surprised to hear her name come up down there.”

“No, not like that. They were talking about an ally.”

“Right. Because her son was the King. Before they both died.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Hunter sighed. “They weren’t talking past-tense, Dean.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think your witch friend is alive.”

“Firstly, not my friend. Secondly, that’s literally not possible.”

“Lucifer beat the hell out of her. And burned the body. No way she comes back from that,” Sam informed, siding with his brother.

“Apparently, there is a way. Unless it’s common for demons to refer to dead people in present-tense,” Hunter scoffed.

“Fine. Say Rowena is in play. Ignoring how impossible that is, that changes things.”

“How?”

“Because Rowena MacLeod is obscenely powerful,” Castiel informed. “Quite possibly the most powerful witch any of us have ever dealt with.”

“She’s also the only one who can open the Cage, where Michael is, as we established,” Sam reminded.

“She’s also a bit of a wildcard. She’ll play for anyone as long as she thinks they’ll win the game,” Dean added.

“So… she’s a problem,” Hunter deduced.

“Of course she’s a problem.”

“What do we do?”

“Evidently, we can’t kill her,” Castiel remarked.

“We need to keep tabs on her then,” Sam replied. “Make sure she’s not playing for the wrong team.”

“The ‘wrong teams’ seem a little out of our league. If _I’m_ playing the odds, I’m choosing Heaven or Hell over whatever the hell we are,” Hunter said.

“The Rowena MacLeod _I_ know isn’t in too much of a hurry to play for Hell’s team.”

“That was when Crowley was running it. The two of them loathed each other; of course she had it out for them. But I think with Crowley out of the picture, she might be more willing to work something out,” Castiel suggested.

“I don’t see her teaming up with Heaven, though,” Dean said. “Given a choice between Bela Talbot and Anael, my gut says she goes with the furnace.”

“Your gut and Rowena’s gut are not the same.”

“But it’s better than nothing,” Dean shrugged. “It’s somewhere to start. We just need to figure out if it’s correct.”

“Besides, unless she’s decided to start up her own team, her only real options are Heaven and Hell. Assuming she thinks we’re not in play. And, quite frankly, even if she _knows_ we’re in play, Heaven and Hell are still her best bets,” Sam added.

“Don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions, Sam. She’s helped us in the past. Maybe she’s sentimental,” Mary suggested.

“Rowena’s not sentimental. She’s opportunistic. She’s going to choose whoever has the upper hand. It’s just a matter of figuring that out.”

“Farrah didn’t mention her,” Castiel commented. “And since she’s already up there anyhow, I think we should start with Hell.”

“I agree. But, for the record, Farrah not mentioning Rowena doesn’t automatically mean Rowena’s not involved with Heaven. They might not have told her. Or she doesn’t know who Rowena is. Or she’s shady. Either way, we can’t just take her word at face-value,” Dean argued.

“Farrah’s an ally, Dean. I think we can trust her. The other two options, I can’t speak for, but her credibility is pretty high. Unless you forgot her part in overthrowing my double.”

“Fine. Still not ruling anything out.”

“Winchesters. So skeptical.”

“You weren’t there when Jofiel died. Her priorities are unstable.”

“Right. But she still came to Heaven and got me out of the prison. And took down Naomi. And got me back down to Earth after I was injured. And did everything in her power to heal the wound. I’m just saying, I think we’re high enough on her list. Besides, I don’t recall her priorities ever shifting so drastically that she completely changed teams.”

“I bet Michael does. The one from her dimension, obviously.”

“As if none of us betrayed someone before.”

“Touché.”

“Look, if she starts giving me a reason to doubt her, then I’ll doubt her. Until then, I’m firmly on her side. As you should be too.”

“I’m on her side.”

“Good.”

“I’m just keeping her at a distance.”

“Dean.”

“I kept you at a distance. I kept Jack at a distance. If anything, this is equality in action,” Dean scoffed, crossing his arms.

“It’s unnecessary.”

“It’s necessary. It balances out your blind faith.”

“It’s not blind, Dean. I have reason.”

“You’re an angel. You’re _programmed_ to have blind faith.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not wrong.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But this still isn’t blind. It’s legitimate. I have reasons.”

“Can you two stop bickering? We’ll never get shit done with the two of you acting like an old married couple,” Hunter interjected irritably.

“He’s got a point, Dean,” Castiel teased.

“Shut the hell up, Cas,” Dean replied, rolling his eyes. He turned to Hunter. “Right. Jack. Rowena. We’re completely focused.”

“About time,” Hunter sighed.


	9. You Really Needn't Worry

As things unfolded in the Winchesters’ timeline, the angels, under the command of Hannah, back in Farrah’s home timeline had finally located the angel tablet. Hannah brought it to Lucifer and Raphael in Heaven’s Control, and the three discussed how to go about getting a prophet.

The tablet, of course, was sealed away in a stone; they only knew what they had because all of the celestials that interacted with it could sense the power that radiated from within it.

“Break it open,” Lucifer insisted. “Go on. It worked for the Winchesters.”

Raphael was slightly hesitant, not wanting to damage the tablet inside. “And if the tablet shatters too?”

“Doesn’t matter. The prophet can fix it. Come on, Raphael; you’re an _archangel_. You should _know_ this.”

“Lack of experience,” Raphael replied, defending his pride.

“Well, in that case, trust me. You open the thing, it’ll bring about a prophet. And considering you’re the lone archangel in play from this side of the gate, you’ll definitely know where that prophet is; you’ll be the one tethered to him. So, if the tablet shatters, it doesn’t matter, because we go fetch the prophet and he puts the damned thing back together.”

“Or she,” Hannah added.

“My money’s on ‘he,’” Lucifer replied coolly. “Every prophet _I’ve_ known was a guy.”

“Fair enough. I’ll bet on ‘she’ just to make things interesting.”

“I didn’t realize angels liked to gamble.”

“It’s hardly gambling if there’s no stakes. We’re not risking anything but bragging rights; that doesn’t count. Besides, lighten up. You’re the devil; I think you can get over some light-hearted betting,” she scoffed.

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “Alright fine. But _anyway_ ,” he looked to Raphael and gestured to the tablet on the desk before them. “Would you like to do the honors?”

Raphael, finally giving into Lucifer’s idea, gave Hannah and Lucifer and small smirk before pulling his archangel blade from his pocket. He eyed it over a few times with pursed lips. With a sigh, he set it down on the table next to the tablet. He vanished for a short second, reappearing with a common angel blade. “I’d hate to damage the good one,” he remarked, explaining his disappearing act. He cleared his throat, directing his attention to the tablet now. Taking in a deep breath, he held the blade in front of him. As he exhaled, he ran it straight down into the stone surrounding the tablet.

The result was anti-climactic.

He’d managed to make a small crack in the stone.

“That was a lot of build-up for little pay-off,” Lucifer commented. “Here, give me the blade; I’ll give it a whirl.”

He, too, only managed a small crack. Still, they added on one another; if they kept going, the cracks would accumulate and destroy the rock.

“Apparently Father wasn’t playing around when he sealed these things,” Hannah said, folding her arms.

“No shit,” Lucifer scoffed, making another crack in the stone.

“Maybe Metatron was right, and we shouldn’t be doing any of this.”

“Hannah, come on. We’re this far; we’re not about to stop now. I don’t care _what_ Metatron has to say about it, frankly.”

“Fine. I’m sure Father had no reason to guard these damn tablets.”

“Hannah.”

“Lucifer.”

“Hannah, the only reason they’re guarded is because there’s more to them than interdimensional travel. These things are basically batteries. Angels can literally siphon His power off of them. Of course he doesn’t want them lying out where everyone can get to them.”

“They what?” Raphael interrupted.

“They’re power sources. Pretty impressive ones, too. They could make an average angel rival our own raw power.”

“Interesting.”

“No,” Hannah insisted.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re not about to exploit the tablets. I’m drawing the line there.”

“Why so stringent all of a sudden?”

“Because they’re put to better use the way we’re using them now, anyway. If we decide to supercharge ourselves, the underlings are going to start asking questions that we don’t need to answer. Avoids rebellion.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Yeah. Because I am.”

“But, theoretically, none of them would be able to take on a superpowered archangel; they’re hardly worthy opponents for us as it is.”

“If all of Heaven gets word that we’ve got the key to God’s power, _all_ of Heaven will be on our asses; supercharged or not, there’s a limit to what the three of us can withstand, Raphael. You’re smarter than that.”

“Fine. But let’s not rule anything out. I want to keep our regime interesting.”

“There are better ways to do that, but it’s your call, I suppose.”

Amidst the conversation, they’d gotten the tablet out of the stone.

Down on Earth, a storm began; thunder roared, and lightning struck worldwide each time an archangel struck the protective stone. Tucked away in a small house in Ontario, a young woman’s head began to throb, the pain getting worse as the blows to the stone persisted. She could hear a faint ringing in her ears.

She was unaware, but the sounds she was hearing was the chatter of thousands of angels; they knew something was up, but they were unsure what it was.

This girl—her name was Leigh Rose Kennedy—this was their prophet.

Hannah had been right.

As Lucifer had predicted, Raphael was immediately in-tune to the location of Leigh Kennedy, being her guardian archangel. He cleared his throat and eyed the tablet. It wasn’t destroyed, but there was a small piece from the top left corner that had detached sometime during the chaos. Still, since Lucifer had been right about his connection to the prophet, he assumed Lucifer was also right about her ability to repair the tablet and, thus, had no issue. He merely straightened his posture and turned to face Lucifer and Hannah. “I’ll be back shortly,” he announced. “I’m going to go fetch our little translator from Ontario.”

“He’s _Canadian_?” Lucifer scoffed. “Who saw that coming?”

“ _She’s_ Canadian,” Hannah insisted.

“We’re still on that?”

“A bet is a bet, Lucifer.”

“Alright, fine.”

Raphael sighed, rolling his eyes, before vanishing to Ontario.

Leigh Rose was not, obviously, expecting Raphael to turn up. As such, his sudden appearance caused her to jump. As she looked him over with wide eyes, her breathing was heavy, and her eyebrows were furrowed. “What the hell?” she exclaimed, taking a step away from him but not daring to remove her eyes from him.

“Relax,” he commanded her, mirroring her step away with a slightly larger step toward her. He softened his facial expression so as to be less off-putting.

“ _Relax_?” she scoffed, backing up to the wall behind her and clenching her hands into tight fists. “Who _are_ you?”

“Raphael.”

“Right. And that gives you the right to just… _show up_ here? How did you get in anyway? The door is locked.”

“I flew.”

“Right. You flew. Of course.”

“I don’t have the time for this,” he sighed. “You’re a prophetess, Miss Kennedy, and your services are required in Heaven,” he informed.

“That’s not possible.”

“Evidently, it is.”

“Sure. Except I’m an _atheist_ , so I doubt ‘Heaven’ wants anything to do with me. Look, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Now.”

“Miss Kennedy, I implore you to put your preconceptions to the side. You were put on the list of prophets well before you came into… _unbelief_.”

She pursed her lips. Her pride had to admit that ‘Leigh Rose Kennedy: Prophetess of the Lord’ had a nice ring to it. Still, she refused to believe what was happening was more than a hallucination—an incredibly vivid dream, probably intertwined with a drug-induced stupor. “Say you’re right, and I go with you. What ‘services’ would I be offering to ‘Heaven’ precisely?”

“Translation. You’ll be reading the Word of God, Miss Kennedy.”

“Right. Raph—I’m going to call you Raph—I’m a freshman college student. Or, at least, I’m _trying_ to be,” she scoffed, looking at the devastation outside her window. “I know the world’s been going to shit recently, but a degree is a degree. And I’m not looking to throw away the possibility of an at least _semi_ -decent future in and amongst this chaos because a man in a suit told me I’m a prophetess. No thank you. You can tell ‘Heaven’ I pass. Find someone else.”

“You really don’t have a choice, Miss Kennedy.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. You’re currently the only one who can read the Word.”

“Right. Sure. An eighteen-year-old from Ontario, Canada is the only person on Earth who can read God-speak. Well, when you put it _that_ way, it sounds completely plausible.”

“Miss Kennedy.”

“Find someone else.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Make it that simple.”

“I suppose it _could_ be that simple if you weren’t in the picture.”

“There, see. Critical thinking.”

“As in dead.”

“Pardon?”

“Those are your options. You come with me, or I kill you to bring about the next prophet. And, believe me, Miss Kennedy; you don’t want to make me get my hands dirty. You won’t enjoy yourself,” he warned, his eyes dark.

She sighed. “Fine.”

“Good.”

He reached out his hand and put it on her shoulder and flew them both up to Heaven.

“Took you long enough,” Hannah said upon hearing Raphael’s wings. She looked over Leigh Rose before giving Lucifer a smirk. “The prophet’s a woman. I win.”

“Congratulations,” Lucifer hissed. He, too, looked over Leigh Rose. “ _This_ is your prophet?” he scoffed.

“And you are?” Leigh asked, inclining her chin.

“Lucifer,” he purred.

Leigh raised a single eyebrow. “I imagined the Devil himself would be… intimidating. You look like a softball coach.”

“I don’t like her,” Lucifer announced, looking at Raphael. “Can we trade her in?”

“Lucifer,” Raphael sighed. “We’re not doing that.”

“Maybe the next prophet on the list is more polite.”

“I like her,” Hannah interrupted. “She’s feisty.”

“You like her because she’s a female, and you won the bet.”

“That’s a bonus. She insulted you to your face, Lucifer. The girl’s got spunk. I like her,” Hannah repeated.

“That makes one of us.”

Leigh extended an amicable hand to Hannah, liking the third angel far more than she did Raphael or Lucifer. “Leigh Rose,” she introduced.

Hannah accepted it. “Hannah,” she responded coolly.

“A pleasure,” Leigh assured. She took her hand back and crossed her arms, beginning now to look about Heaven’s Control Center. “So… this is Heaven.”

“The one and only,” Raphael confirmed.

“It’s a tad bit of a letdown, wouldn’t you say? Your religion hypes this place up more than it deserves to be.”

“Miss Kennedy, focus. And, for the record, this is simply… behind-the-scenes. Once you die and your soul ends up in Heaven Proper, I’m sure you’ll have a different opinion.”

“Can’t wait,” Leigh replied.

“The Word is on the desk.”

“Right to business, I see.”

“Angels are hardly the most exciting of the biblical species,” Hannah informed.

“Evidently.” She left Raphael’s side and looked over the tablet. “You think I can read this?” she asked with a scoff. “I—hold on.” She was prepared to insist she didn’t possess the skill, but the longer she eyed it, the more it came into focus. Some words instantly began to make sense, though staring into the tablet gave her a migraine almost immediately. Still, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. She took the two pieces in her hand and fused them together. She felt, deep down somewhere she didn’t know she had feeling, that she and the tablet were a complete set.

Lucifer smirked. “That’s our little prophet.”


	10. Now I Realize There is No Righteous Path

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is pretty much part one of a two-part ordeal, and because I'll be out of town next Monday and won't be able to post, part two is also being posted today. There'll be chapter 12 on Thursday as per usual, just nothing next Monday.

A couple weeks’ time landed Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Farrah in American Falls, Idaho while Mary and Hunter hung back at the bunker to see what could be done about locating Jack, Rowena, or both. They were there on Farrah’s tip, which she’d gotten from, of course, the angels. As she had put it to the Winchesters back at the bunker, the church congregations had been explosive in the western United States; people had been vaporized on site or found dead in their homes shortly after sermons. It started in Scottsdale, Arizona, and had been occurring sporadically across the west. Farrah was sure it was angels seeking vessels, since Heaven was still dead-set on getting as many soldiers on the ground as possible in order to locate the Nephilim. However if viable vessels were dying after accepting their angel, evidently something was amiss, and she decided, for everyone’s sake, it ought to be swiftly and thoroughly investigated. As such, she’d promptly told Anael where she was headed and flew down to greet the Winchesters. And Castiel.

They wound up in American Falls due to the talk Farrah had picked up on the angel radio; she knew that was the next place they planned to descend upon, and from there it was a matter of catching up.

The angels had gotten there first though they’d left considerably later; Farrah had wanted to fly while Dean insisted on driving. They’d made a compromise in which Farrah flew herself and Castiel while the Winchester boys would arrive via highway. In the meantime, as they waited for Sam and Dean to show up, Castiel and Farrah scoped out the church where the next hit was planned to take place.

“So I understand why angels would be flocking to mass services like this,” Castiel remarked as the two made their ways discreetly inside. “But I don’t understand… anything else.”

“That puts us on the same page then, C,” Farrah sighed. They stood far back in the wings; it was doubtful the patrons even noticed they’d come.

Castiel rolled his eyes, watching the events with folded arms. “So… what are we looking for then?” he asked her.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“That many angels coming to Earth should create some chaos.”

“Right. But we don’t _need_ signs of angelic descent, remember? We need signs of… well, I don’t know. Something else.”

“So we’re looking for a sign.”

“A sign of something other than celestials.”

“So pretty much anything.”

“Exactly.”

As the sermon was nearing the climax, the angels clutched their heads as they were simultaneously struck with angelic communication. _Commence descent_ , it said. Their brethren were coming, meaning their time was narrowing.

Farrah’s keen eye noticed the bizarre interactions between a young non-believer—who had been making snide comments during much of the sermon—and an old man sitting next to him. She nudged Castiel and gestured toward the pair with her head. He watched with narrowed eyes. “Think he’s a suspect?” she asked, staring the elderly man down.

Castiel nodded, and, almost immediately after, a storm outside started. “That’s our cue,” Castiel insisted. “I don’t feel up to watching all these people die. We can’t exactly stop the will of Heaven under such a time constraint, but I’m sure we can at least minimize the catastrophe.”

Farrah replied coldly. “I need to see where this leads.”

“You’d watch these people suffer and do nothing about it?”

Farrah nodded. “Greater good, Castiel. I don’t like it, but if we can figure out what’s up, it might save God knows how many other towns.”

Castiel sighed, but he didn’t protest. Instead, he simply walked outside and waited, cringing at the sounds of the screaming inside.

Farrah came out unaccompanied after the chaos died down. She’d been quick; Peter and Pastor Gregory were still inside by the time she reached Castiel. “Two survivors,” she informed. “Though, oddly enough, no vessels. The pastor lives, and one man lives, but without a parasite. I assume he rejected the angels. Smart man,” she remarked callously. “Guess we have our two first stops, yeah? The preacher and the infidel?”

Castiel nodded, though still wary of Farrah’s behavior.

“Sam and Dean should be turning up rather shortly,” Farrah said, noting the setting sun to their west. “Go meet up with them, why don’t you? I’ll take another look inside.”

“There’s hardly an inside.”

“Sure there is. There are walls.”

Castiel rolled his eyes, but he listened to her suggestion and headed to the motel they’d pre-planned (for a change) with the Winchesters. They’d figured if the two groups were to go separately, it only made sense to have a meeting point predetermined and, collectively, had settled on establishing the motel as such. Given Farrah wasn’t accompanying him and he, presently, had no car, it forced Castiel to walk to the motel, but he didn’t mind as the trip wasn’t exceptionally far. As a result, by the time he arrived so did the Winchesters. They climbed out of the Impala, and all three men greeted one another before Dean noted Farrah’s absence.

“She’s checking out the church. Investigating the damage,” Castiel informed, his muscles and voice now stiff.

“I assumed you two would be there to try and _prevent_ damage,” Dean scoffed.

“Evidently not,” Castiel replied. “Honestly, we were a bit late to do that. But you know what you said about Farrah potentially being… shady? I’m finally starting to come around to your side on that one, I think.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not sure what it is. She seems… off, I suppose.”

“How so?”

“Like I said, we were too late to have _prevented_ anything, but we definitely could have done _something_. But she wasn’t interested; she wanted to see what happened. She just stayed there and watched as all that carnage took place. It was unnerving. I don’t want to doubt her, but she’s made it a bit difficult. To be able to sit back and do nothing while all those people get blown to dust? It seems a little dodgy for my liking.”

“What seems dodgy, C?” Farrah asked, appearing directly behind him just as he’d gotten the sentence out.

Castiel tensed, looking for a cover. “Just… the whole situation at the church, you know? We talked about this—it’s weird that the vessels don’t survive.”

“Problem is, we don’t _have_ a vessel here to test it out, remember? Neither of the two people that left that church had a partner, as far as I noticed.”

“Right,” Castiel replied, his voice low. He looked between the Winchesters. “Nothing adds up.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean assured.

“How do you propose we do that?”

“I—we’ll figure it out.”

“We could always wait for them to strike again,” Farrah suggested coolly. “Maybe next time they’ll catch a vessel. Although, and correct me if I’m mistaken, won’t you, Castiel—I’m a bit perplexed. The angels haven’t said anything about finding a new target.”

The three men looked between each other, all with pursed lips. Ignoring her callous initial proposal, Castiel shrugged. “Maybe they aren’t moving.”

“What sense does that make?”

“Plenty,” Sam interjected. “You said there were no successful vessels at that church, yeah?”

Farrah nodded slowly, trying to figure out what Sam was getting at.

“Maybe they’re hovering, hoping to give American Falls another go,” Sam suggested. “Could be wrong, I suppose, but it adds up.”

“Say you’re right,” Farrah replied, inclining her chin. “How do you figure we put a stop to it, since you lot are so clearly against Round Two?”

“You two have a communication line, don’t you?” Dean scoffed. “Listen for updates; that’s where we start.”

“In the meantime, it’s not like we have _no_ leads,” Castiel reminded. “There’s still the pastor and the churchgoer.”

“Right,” Farrah said as if she had forgotten. She inhaled sharply as she was stricken with an idea. “How about the three of you question our survivors? I’ll be back quickly, I promise.”

“Where are you going?” Dean asked, distrusting.

“I figure since I can fly I could go to Salt Lake—where the last massacre was—and see what I can find there. I’m _sure_ law enforcement has _some_ type of information, right? Even if it’s just depictions of the crime scenes. And, as far as I know, multiple people walked out of that church. There’s _bound_ to be a vessel.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sam breathed.

Castiel was still eyeing Farrah with suspicion. Still, her plan was a good one, so he played along.

Farrah had promptly gone to Salt Lake City. Sam, Dean, and Castiel, meanwhile, were busy with the two survivors from American Falls. They had split into two in effort to divide and conquer; Dean and Castiel questioned the pastor, and Sam took the churchgoer.

Sam immediately understood the reason Peter Blake, the churchgoer, hadn’t accepted the angels’ plea to become a vessel. By his own admission, he, when he attended the sermon, was a staunch atheist—anti-theist, really—who had come on account of his parents’ insistence. He still was, to an extent, though, he had admitted the experience broadened his horizons considerably.

“I’m not sure if I would call it a ‘religious’ thing,” Peter said coolly. “If scenes like that are how the Judeo-Christian God expresses his presence, He’s not a figure I wish to worship, you know? It was the single most harrowing thing I could have experienced in that moment. No doubt.”

“Right,” Sam replied. “I was hoping you could provide some detail; what exactly happened in the church, Mr. Blake?”

“You said you’re with whom?”

“An independent news journal, sir. Just trying to collect some facts—warn people what’s going on. You have to know about the similar events around the west, yeah?”

Peter nodded and relaxed himself the best he could. “I’m not going into extreme detail, understand? There are some things that don’t need to be put into words.”

“As much as you’d like to provide.”

“It started with the thunderstorm; no—no it started with the old man next to me. Bastard didn’t make it out, but I remember him so damn clearly. I was going to exit early, you see, and this guy—he has to be in his seventies, and he takes my arm and holds it tight. Inhumanly tight, even. So I sit my ass back down; I don’t know _what_ was with him, but I didn’t want to contest it. After that, the storm started. The preacher’s down in the pulpit yelling about the angels coming down to Earth. Lights start exploding—not just going out. I mean legitimately bursting; there’s glass everywhere. The windows shatter; the entire building is shaking, and it’s pitch black—and no one’s doing _anything_. So I try again to get myself out, and I can’t. Then this earsplitting noise, like a high-pitched whistle, starts blasting my eardrums. And at some point in the whole thing I feel the old man let go of my arm. And it’s the damnedest thing, but I swear I heard someone asking me to invite them in. The pastor would probably insist it was the angels, but I have no idea what happened. The whole thing was so fucked; it was probably an audio-hallucination. Now, through a lot of this, I was tucked into myself. So, once it seemed like the chaos died down, I look around me and the whole congregation is dead—either with their eyes completely burnt out or, and this is the weird one, some people are just… gone. I’d assume they exploded, since the walls were completely drenched in blood, but that’s madness, right? I digress—the specifics don’t matter. Everyone is dead but me and that damned Pastor Gregory. And all he has to say for it is ‘That could have gone better.’ That’s it.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Hell if I know. I told the local law enforcement to keep tabs on the man. Doubt they will, but it doesn’t hurt to try. I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“Absolutely not. Look, if you keep it off the record, I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

“Off the record.”

“Cool. So, Pastor Gregory. New around town, you know. And he got here maybe two weeks ago—a transfer from Salt Lake City.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Didn’t a church massacre—”

“You’re damn right. And, of course, I found that sketchy from the jump. So I look into the guy—been up and down the western USA. Never seems to stay too long. Always seems to leave after some type of… mass murder. Recently, it’s been the churches, but before there were schools. And offices. Malls. This shit _follows_ him. And, honestly, no one in American Falls was too keen on him—except the truly devout religious people. Old lady Beverly—she died in the massacre. That woman worshiped the ground Gregory walked on. But a lot of other townsfolk are… less enthusiastic. We just don’t trust him, you know? He’s… there’s something not right about that man.”

Sam held his chin on an incline. “Thank you for all your help, Mr. Blake.”

“If I hear you went and put that information about Pastor Gregory in circulation, you’ll regret the day you were born. You understand me?”

“Trust me, Mr. Blake. I assure you that no sensitive information will be divulged. You have my word.”

As Sam was receiving more than enough from Peter Blake, Castiel and Dean were faring far worse with Pastor Gregory. He was a reserved man, contrary to his occupational habits.

“I don’t have anything to say about that church,” he insisted after any attempt to get him to talk. He was sitting rigidly, looking back and forth between Dean and Castiel.

“Pastor, you’re aware this is a federal investigation?” Dean asked gently.

“Of course. I saw the badges.”

“Right,” Dean sighed. “And you’re aware that withholding evidence is a crime?”

“Of course. Which is why I’m not withholding evidence.”

Dean felt his own muscles tense out of irritation. “I find that hard to believe.”

“You’re starting to sound like Peter Blake,” the pastor scoffed with a shake of his head. “Faith is power, Agent.”

“So, assuming you _aren’t_ withholding anything, how is it possible that… whatever it was that happened in that church didn’t get you too? Or Peter Blake, for that matter?”

“God works in mysterious ways, young man.”

“There’s mysterious and then there’s bullshit.”

“I believe it’s time for you to be on your ways,” the pastor said tersely. “I have nothing that you need, gentlemen. It’s been wonderful, really.”

“Like hell it is,” Dean all-but growled.

Castiel tugged at Dean’s sleeve. “It’s time, Dean,” he insisted urgently.

Dean narrowed his eyes, perplexed. Nonetheless, he obliged, giving a mock-polite nod to Pastor Gregory. “Good day, pastor.”

“Good day, gentlemen.”

Once out of Gregory’s earshot, Dean stopped Castiel and looked his friend up and down. “Are you mad?” he scoffed.

“No,” Castiel replied defiantly. “But I could see that man’s true face; he’s possessed, Dean.”

Dean sighed. “Demons. Of course it’s Demons.”

Castiel shook his head. “Angels.”


	11. Just Enough to Make Us Dangerous

“It’s angels,” Farrah and Castiel said simultaneously.

She had tipped the men off to her imminent return to Idaho, and it was timed out that the three separate parties met back up at the same time. And, even more conveniently, they’d drawn the same conclusion.

“But I don’t understand,” Farrah admitted, realizing the collective was on the same page. “Why are the angels offing one another?”

“That’s what we wanted to know,” Sam replied dryly.

“We were _hoping_ maybe you’d find something,” Dean admitted.

“I’ve got nothing but a messy death and a pair of angel wings,” Farrah sighed. “You and Cassandra talked to an angel who was _involved_ , though, did you not?”

“We did,” Castiel confirmed.

“And you found nothing?”

“He wasn’t in the caring-and-sharing mood,” Dean replied, rolling his eyes. “He’s definitely hiding something; I guarantee he’s got some type of knowledge.”

“Obviously, if he’s leading the church services that are getting these massacres going in the first place,” Farrah said. “But what’s the motive? Shouldn’t he be trying to help the angels get their vessels? Heaven’s devoting all its resources to finding Jack; you’d think the angels that actually act like they should—” She looked at Castiel with a shake of her head. “—would be intent on being… productive. I find it hard to believe he’s this incompetent incidentally, but I don’t understand his endgame.”

“So we’re missing something,” Sam said with a shrug.

“Clearly,” Farrah replied with a nod. “But how do you reckon we figure it out?”

Sam shook his head, at a loss. “Wait,” he said slowly, remembering details from his talk with Peter Blake. “I talked to our witness—Peter Blake—about what he saw when everything was going on. It completely slipped my mind, but his tip about Gregory wasn’t the only thing he told me.”

“Go on,” Farrah prompted, gesturing toward Sam.

“He mentioned this old man in the pews with what he thought was ‘inhuman’ levels of strength,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “Apparently the man grabbed Peter’s wrist to force him to be present for the remainder of the sermon and lost his grip sometime in and amongst the chaos. It might be nothing, but in this line of business it’s hard to hear something described as ‘inhuman’ without jumping to conclusions.”

“Think he was possessed?”

“I’d assume so.”

“An angel?”

“Perhaps, but I find it implausible. I mean, if the angels are searching for vessels and struggling, and if the old man was a viable vessel, why leave?”

“So then what?”

“Maybe it _is_ demons,” Dean interjected. “Some type of infiltration.”

“That’s actually a possibility, come to think,” Farrah said, crossing her arms. “The demons ought know the angels are in pursuit of that Nephilim, right? _Everyone’s_ looking for the kid. So I wonder if they haven’t been letting the angels do their vessel hunting and then taking the opportunity to off the ones that survive. Takes two pieces off the chessboard—one less angel, one less vessel strong enough to house one.”

“Wonderful. A tactical holy war is just what we need right now.”

“Don’t worry,” Farrah scoffed. “That’s my area of expertise.”

“Hilarious, really.”

“Your humorless ass aside, then, what do you propose we do about this—assuming this actually is two shitty operations at once?”

“There’s four of us, isn’t there? Divide and conquer. Two head off the demons; two take down the angels. Not too complicated.”

“Seems fair enough,” she conceded. “How are we splitting?”

“Sam and I can take the priest—he’s just one simple angel. _You_ two find those demons. I assume to do that you’ll need to find the next target sermon, and neither of us can help you there.”

Farrah looked between Castiel and Sam to try and weed out reservations. When she noted none, she turned back to Dean and shrugged. “Sounds like a plan.”

And so began the wait for angel communications. As it turned out, they didn’t need to wait too terribly long. Just two days later, they received angelic confirmation of the location of the next church, and, immediately, both pairs were ready to take action.

Sam and Dean loaded their duffels with holy oil, lighters, and an angel blade each and packed them haphazardly into the backseat of the Impala and climbed inside, bound to the pastor’s house; Castiel and Farrah made off to the church almost immediately.

Incidentally, things hadn’t gone to plan, as seemed to be the usual with the Winchesters.

When Sam and Dean arrived at Pastor Gregory’s abode, they were greeted not by Gregory but by a bruised and bloody Peter Blake who couldn’t stand, much less walk, on his own. They approached hesitantly, unsure what hell awaited them.

“I don’t bite,” Peter insisted, panting just to get out his words. “You’re just in time, lads.”

“Looks like,” Sam replied tensely. He looked Peter up and down then darted his gaze around the house. “What happened, Mr. Blake? Are you alright?”

“Do I look alright to you?” Peter scoffed. It was followed immediately by a guttural, bloody cough. He rolled his eyes and cleared his throat. “I’ll survive,” he insisted dryly. “But the other question, I can’t answer. Been wondering that myself.”

“Can you tell us anything? Even if you don’t understand it?”

Peter nodded. “You’ll remember I told you about not trusting Pastor Gregory? I decided to stop in before his next sermon—make sure he knew he was being monitored, you know? So I swing by, and who am I met with but the old man from the pews and little old lady Beverly.”

“You said they were dead.”

“They were.”

“Right,” Sam sighed, piecing the story together. “Did you by chance see their eyes?”

“Of course I saw their eyes, boy. What—you think I avoided looking them in the eyes while they tore me to ribbons? I saw them.”

“Was there… This is going to sound like a strange question, so bear with me. Was there anything unusual about them?”

“Now that you mention, I think I saw Bev’s flicker black for a little bit sometime. But it must have been some crazy lighting trick. Why?”

“No reason.”

Sam and Dean looked to one another. The angels knew from communication on high the location of the next sermon; the brothers, however, did not. And though their angelic comrades were prepared to take on some demons, they had not prepared themselves for the pastor as well.

They tried to reach Castiel, but had been unsuccessful. As such, they decided to try Farrah’s number instead. Conveniently enough, she rang them just before they had the chance to dial in her number.

Dean answered his phone almost the instant it started to vibrate. “Farrah?” he asked abrasively, climbing into the Impala with Sam. He set it to speaker to bring Sam into the discussion. “What the hell is going on? You and Cas need to either work out a fast plan B or get the hell out of that church; our angel isn’t here. He’s—”

“He’s here. I know,” she informed, far calmer sounding than Dean but equally as tense. “You’re a little late to the party, Dean. Plan B is the only option we have at the moment.”

“What exactly _is_ plan B?” Sam asked.

“I’m working on it,” she sighed. “But we need to go fast.” Her breath was picking up as she grew progressively more flustered.

“What’s wrong, Farrah?” Sam queried, noting the distress in her voice.

“It’s Castiel,” she replied stiffly. “He—” She cut off as the angels began to descend on the church, clutching her phone to her chest and closing her eyes for a second. She exhaled deeply and put the phone back to her ear, now yelling to be able to hear herself over the commotion. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” Dean asked.

“I mean your hint came a bit late. The demons—they found us before we found them, caught us by surprise. They took C with them when they left. But I don’t know where they went. Or what’s going on. I assume you can hear the background? The church is being absolutely levelled behind me, Dean. _No one_ is coming out of this alive, and I’m completely out of ideas.”

“Calm down,” Sam insisted. “Look, no one’s angry about the church, alright? It’s not your fault. And there’s nothing we can do about that now.”

“We need to focus on finding Cas,” Dean added, putting the conversation back on track.

“Right, right,” she breathed. “Any ideas?”

“We’re working on it,” Sam replied, still the calmest voice in the conversation

“Meet us back at our hotel,” Dean instructed. “We’ll figure out where to go from here.”

“Alright,” Farrah sighed.

The chaos around her ceased the instant she vacated.

In the midst of this, the demons had dragged Castiel back, as it would be, to the pastor’s home. Peter Blake was gone by this point, and the house had been their sanctuary for the duration of their stay in Idaho. They bound him to a chair with a set of angelic handcuffs; the entire time, he was snarling up at them, trying his damnedest to figure out an escape plan.

“Hey, beautiful,” the old man greeted, his head at an incline and his eyes looking down on Castiel. “How’s it going?”

“Go to Hell.”

“Been there, done that,” the old man scoffed. “Allow me to introduce myself.”

“I don’t care who you are.”

“My name is Timon,” the old man continued, ignoring Castiel’s protests. He gestured to lady Beverly. “That there is Prisca.”

“Congratulations.”

“Word on the street is you’ve got a link to that Nephilim boy,” Prisca said, inserting herself into the conversation.

“Oh, is it?” Castiel asked, raising an eyebrow. “And you believe every rumor you hear?”

“We believe this one,” Timon replied with a casual shrug. “Would you care to help us find him?”

“I’ll pass on that, thanks.”

“I don’t think he gets it,” Timon sighed to Prisca. He looked back to Castiel. “You’re going to help us find him.”

“Like hell I am.”

Castiel had been stalling for time when engaging in the conversation. Unbeknownst to Timon and Prisca, he’d taken a tough splinter from his chair and was working on picking the lock to the handcuffs. It wasn’t going too efficiently, but he persevered.

It worked.

He’d sprung himself free and, in record time, had his hand on Prisca’s forehead. With a burst of light, she was dead, and her vessel dropped to the floor. Smirking triumphantly, he turned back to Timon—or, at least, where he thought Timon was. In the time it to Castiel to smite Prisca, the other demon had fled and returned with a sizeable syringe containing an opaque black mixture. It had streaks of bluish white mixed in—undoubtedly angel’s grace. He’d never seen such a liquid before.

Castiel approached Timon. He put a hand to the demon’s forehead, smiting him, but not before Timon had buried the needle of the syringe deep into Castiel’s flesh, unleashing the mysterious substance into the angel’s veins. His vessel fell to the floor, and Castiel followed, clutching his arm in agony. Still, he was alive; the demons were not. He rummaged through Timon’s jacket and retrieved his cell phone, which Timon had stolen upon his capture of Castiel, calling Dean as promptly as he could manage. He set the call to speaker and dropped his phone on the ground, winded and unable to hold the phone to his ear.

“Cas?” Dean answered. He, too, set it to speaker so Sam and Farrah could take part. “Cas, where the hell are you? Farrah said you were captured.”

“She’s not wrong,” Castiel panted. His body contorted as a response to the pain in his arm, but he refused to make too much noise should the Winchesters question him.

“Are you good?” Sam scoffed. “You sound exhausted.”

“I’m fine,” Castiel insisted.

“Where are you?” Farrah asked, repeating Dean’s question.

“Pastor Gregory’s basement.”

Farrah raised an eyebrow. “I’ll be there in a second.”

“It’s not—I’ll come to you,” Castiel said, trying to deter any of them from discovering the ailment as he refused to cause excessive panic.

“I’ll be there in a second,” Farrah repeated. She looked up to Sam and Dean. “You two stay on the line so we can communicate when I’m there.”

Dean nodded, and that was Farrah’s cue. She appeared by Castiel’s side, though she was initially unaware of the proximity, given his position on the floor. “ _Christ_ ,” she exclaimed, noting his condition. “What the hell, C?”

“I’m fine,” he continued to insist. However, a sharp pain overtook his entirety, and it was too much to stifle. He yelled out in response and doubled further over.

“Farrah?” Dean asked, hearing the distress. “What’s going on?”

She looked around the floor for any clues and noticed the syringe. She rolled her eyes and picked it up, examining the traces left behind. “Damn it,” she sighed. “It’s poison,” she told Dean, raising her voice so the phone would pick it up.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Castiel kept insisting.

“Shut up,” Farrah demanded. “You’re lucky I’ve seen this before; it was a favorite of dear Michael’s. And no, you’re not fine. This stuff isn’t a joke; it kills you slowly and painfully.”

“Can’t wait,” Castiel replied sarcastically.

“ _But_ there’s a cure—a relatively simple cure, really. We just need to find whatever angel they took grace from.”

“Probably whoever’s inhabiting Pastor Gregory,” Sam interjected.

“Right,” she replied lightly. She paused for a brief moment to think. “No wonder I couldn’t tell he was possessed when we got here—must not have had enough grace at the time to register with me. Come on,” Farrah said to Castiel as she lifted him off the ground. She flew the pair back to the motel. “Hello, boys,” she greeted the Winchesters, laying the other angel gently on the bed.

Dean hung up the phone call, eyeing Castiel as he writhed in agony.

“I’ll be back shortly,” Farrah assured. “I need to find that Pastor; the cure isn’t too complicated, but I need some of his grace to make it.”

“Don’t get dead,” Dean replied.

“Not planning on it.”

With that, she was gone.

Castiel was unresponsive to Sam and Dean’s attempts to clear the air in Farrah’s absence, focused too intently on the indescribably hostile sensation consuming his body. The brothers kept trying to initiate conversation—with or without the angel—but with the sounds of his struggling in such proximity and volume, it was far too difficult to focus. Instead, they sat in silence, cringing at the noises he made and staring anywhere but at one another.

Eventually, Dean called up Mary, figuring that, as a mother, she should know what to do.

Farrah, meanwhile, was on the prowl. Her first stop was the church she had just been to with Castiel. However, it was a bust; the ecclesiastical was levelled—completely gone. She stood frozen, staring at the site in awe for a few seconds before bringing herself back to her mission. She had a hitlist of places in her mind—the church was only the first. Clearing her throat and stiffening her posture, she flew herself to the next target. Again, it was empty. The pastor’s house was left exactly how she had last seen it; the vessels of the two demons lay lifeless on the ground, the syringe on the floor beside the old man. She sighed and ran through her short list again.

Third time was the charm, it would seem, and she found the pastor alone at the first church that was hit in American Falls.

“I figured someone would be after me,” he scoffed as she approached. “I saw what was left of my—or, I suppose my _vessel’s_ —home.”

“Then I assume you know what I’m looking for.”

He pursed his lips and gestured to his neck. “I have a guess. Although, I’ve got to admit—you aren’t what I was expecting, young lady.”

“Oh? What might that be?”

“Either the belligerent one or his silent angel friend. You working with them or against them?”

“I’m working for myself, Pastor.”

“Please. Isaiah.”

“ _That’s_ where you’ve been hiding this whole time? The American west?”

“Not hiding,” he insisted. “Merely lurking.”

“Oh, well, in that case, everything’s cleared,” Farrah snarled.

“Who might you be, little lady?”

“Farrah.”

“Farrah A or Farrah B?”

“Farrah.”

“Quite the tongue on you.”

“What’s your angle, Isaiah?”

“Compensation.”

Farrah raised an eyebrow.

“The demons do far better business than Heaven. I help them take down a few angels, and they’re willing to pay quite handsomely.”

“Ever the opportunist.”

“What you call opportunistic, I call good business.”

“Won’t be such good business when I run you dry.”

“Feisty.”

“Your little black-eyed pimps poisoned my friend,” Farrah growled, taking a step toward him. “I’ve earned feisty.”

“So you _are_ working with Castiel.”

Farrah shrugged.

“Heaven and Hell have been dying to catch him, you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“You’d be rewarded heavily if you’d turn him in rather than hide him.”

“I’ll pass, thank you.”

Now he took a step toward her. “That’s probably for the better. I was hoping to take him myself.”

Simultaneously, the two dropped angel blades from there sleeves. Farrah stood still as Isaiah approached her. As he drew near arm’s reach, she flew to his original position in the destroyed pulpit. “Catch me if you can, Isaiah,” she taunted with a smirk.

“You bitch,” he growled. He broke out into a run to catch her.

Again, she thwarted his effort, flying back to what was her original post now. “Alright,” she conceded. “Enough games. I’m here. Come get me.”

Isaiah took up her offer. Once he stood before her, he made to end the fight with one clean hit to her torso. However, before he could, she was behind him. She held her blade to his neck along with a vial she’d had in her pocket and deftly extracted the remainder of his grace before stabbing his now human body through the back for good measure.

Before heading back to the motel, she procured a few necessary ingredients for her cure. Then, triumphantly, she returned to Team Free Will, holding the vial of Isaiah’s grace on display. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” she greeted. She noted Castiel’s deteriorating state and instantly got to work on her remedy.

As the cure required the slightest amount of Castiel’s grace to activate, she gingerly approached him with her blade and removed the necessary portion before sealing the laceration. He’d barely noticed she’d done anything as he was preoccupied by the pain of the poison.

“Alright,” she said, adding the trace of his grace into the cure. “Drink,” she commanded him, taking his head in her hand and forcing the cure into him.

There was a bright light, and, once it had dissipated, there was nary a sign Castiel had been agonized in the first place. Farrah was gone before any of the men could thank her.


	12. Hunting's the Only Clarity You're Gonna Find

During Farrah, Castiel, Sam, and Dean’s stint in American Falls, Idaho, Mary and Hunter had managed to find a lead on Bela Talbot.

They’d caught wind from gossip circulating between hunters that there was heavy demonic activity around Lawrence, Kansas, and they’d decided to investigate it while they had the time on their hands.

As it turned out, there was a medium-sized home absolutely swarming with demons; they didn’t have the opportunity or the equipment to blast through there, so they’d gone back to the bunker after finding out. Evidently, whatever was in the house was important and heavily guarded. Naturally, they needed in.

Almost immediately following Sam and Dean’s return, they were greeted by Mary and Hunter explaining what they’d discovered. And so, almost as soon as the boys had arrived, they left again to check out Lawrence; this time, they’d have their whole arsenal, including one of two angels. Farrah had not returned from Idaho.

“Run me through this again,” Dean said into his phone as they neared Lawrence. As there were too many to fit into one car, they’d taken two. Mary and Castiel were in one; Sam, Dean, and Hunter were in the other.

“There’s not much to say,” Mary’s voice said, crackling through his speakers. “We never got a close look. But there’s demons all over the thing. _Something’s_ in there.”

“I don’t understand how you people think a group of humans has anything on them demons,” Hunter scoffed, shaking his head dismissively.

“For starters, we have an angel,” Dean countered.

“Hello,” Castiel acknowledged.

“ _And_ we know what we’re doing,” Dean finished.

“ _You_ know what you’re doing,” Hunter retorted. “I sure as hell don’t.”

“Then follow our lead, and don’t get yourself killed; sound good to you?”

Hunter rolled his eyes. “Alright, fine. But what—the plan’s just to go in guns blazing and hope it goes right?”

“God, no,” Mary replied swiftly. “We’re not _trying_ to be found, Hunter. The plan is to at least try and be stealthy.”

“Obviously we’re going to be found by _someone_ at _some point_ ,” Sam added. “But as long as we keep to ourselves, ideally it won’t be too many demons at once.”

“Ideally,” Hunter quoted.

“Look, hunting’s not perfect, alright? You go in with your weapon and your courage and assume it’ll go fine.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then it doesn’t. And you figure something else out fast.”

“Great.”

“Glad to see we’re all on the same page,” Dean said, though he was fully aware of Hunter’s discourage.

They didn’t park their cars directly in front of the house for fear of being too conspicuous. Instead, it was a ways down the street. The boys drove a distinctive car; they needed to hide her somewhere. Once they all pulled in and grouped up, the humans retrieved weaponry from the trunk of the Impala—Hunter included.

The prophet offered the angel a shotgun full of rock salt, which was respectfully declined. Castiel showed Hunter his hands. “These are all the weaponry I need,” he assured. He dropped an angel blade from his right sleeve when he pulled his arms back to his side, which he displayed to Hunter. “Those, and this.”

Hunter inclined his chin as Castiel stashed the blade away. The Winchester clan gathered around them. “Alright,” Dean said, reigning everyone in. “Sam and I will go in first, get the guards nice and distracted. You three do some digging.”

“I’m coming with you,” Castiel insisted.

“Like hell you are,” Dean scoffed. “After the stunt you pulled in Idaho? Off the table.” He crossed his arms defiantly.

“The ‘stunt’ I pulled?” Castiel sighed. “Come on, Dean. I can blast through those demons a hell of a lot easier than you can.”

“That’s why Hunter and Mom need you,” Dean insisted. “Protection.”

“Dean, I’m a grown woman with more experience than you,” Mary protested. “I think Hunter and I will be just fine if Cas joins you.”

“ _I_ think it makes more sense to keep the angel with the prophet,” Sam interjected, taking his brother’s side. “The demons are going to want him back, so he could use all the protection he can get. Besides, if Jack’s in there, you three are the ones that are going to find him, and he’s going to want to see Cas first. _And_ he’s going to need protected.”

“Fine,” Castiel conceded, stepping back to be in line with Mary. “Although, frankly, if we find Jack in there and set him loose, he’s more than capable of handling some demons on his own. I have less power than he does.”

“Safety in numbers,” Dean countered.

“Says the guy that wants to go headfirst into God knows how many demons with only his brother.”

“Worked every other time.”

“Not every.”

“Worked most other times.”

“Just don’t be an idiot.”

“I’m not planning on it.”

With that, Castiel, Hunter, and Mary hung back for a few minutes, leaving Sam and Dean unattended as they approached the house. The front yard was kept under patrol by a duo of demons; one possessed a teenage girl, the other a boy roughly her age. As they approached, the boy was in front of Dean and the girl in front of Sam, so that’s how the pairs ended up splitting to take one another on once the Winchesters got the demons’ attention.

It took the Winchester boys all of a minute to clear the two demons; though they tried to put up a fight, it was considerably less enthusiastic than what they’d gotten from demons in the past. The boy took one swing at Dean, which was deftly avoided, before finding himself at the mercy of Dean’s angel blade. The girl had faired slightly better, managing two swings (one punch that she landed) before dying at the hands of Ruby’s knife. The brothers straightened their posture and looked over to one another before looking behind them. Mary, Hunter, and Castiel were approaching now that the coast was clear, so they turned back to each other, nodded once they’d made eye contact, and headed inside ahead of the rest of their party.

Mary walked slightly in front of Castiel and Hunter, leading their conquest. Sam and Dean had already disappeared into the house by the time the other three reached the yard. Their progress was slightly delayed when Hunter stopped to stare at the two dead vessels.

“Get it together, Hunter,” Mary urged. “You should be used to this by now anyway, I would think.”

“The word you’re looking for is ‘familiar,’ ma’am. Don’t matter how many times I end up seeing a dead body, that don’t make me ‘used to it.’”

“We need to keep moving,” Castiel intervened, siding with Mary. “Sam and Dean can’t hold everyone at bay forever.”

“Right. Of course,” Hunter replied, clearing his throat. “Lead the way, Mrs. W,” he said with a grand gesture toward the door.

Mary nodded to him before stealthily approaching the door. It was already wide open thanks to her sons. The sounds of fighting could be heard from within the house; undoubtedly, her sons taking on more and more guards.

The house itself was relatively straightforward in layout. Still, they weren’t sure whether to check the upstairs or the downstairs. As such, Castiel decided to preempt the time-wasting discussion when he suggested to Mary, “Go on upstairs. Hunter and I can take the basement.”

She accepted and headed up the staircase, which was right by the doorway. The stairs that lead downstairs were nearby as well, but farther on inside.

As Mary would discover, the upstairs was relatively empty. Though every bedroom in the house was on the top floor, there was nothing much to be spoken of. Except, however, when she reached the attic, she encountered a being she thought could be of use.

After taking down the demon, she neared her target.

The woman before her was an angel, as evidenced by the blue-white of her grace shining from her lacerations.

“Mary Winchester,” Mary said in a hushed, gentle voice as she undid the binds holding the angel captive.

Once the ties were free, the angel finally responded. “Elizabeth,” she introduced, breathy and relatively weak. “Thank you.”

“It’s no problem,” Mary assured. “What happened here, Elizabeth?”

“The angels wanted to free Michael, so Anael sent out some mercenaries to scope out the Cage and maybe find Rowena MacLeod. Not to mention, we’d caught wind of some angels siding with Hell, so we were sent to make examples out of them. Most of us returned home once things went south; the demons caught me before I had the chance.”

“Rowena MacLeod. So she _is_ alive.”

“Absolutely.”

“Is Heaven still looking for her?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I’m not positive. They’ve got the Nephilim up there now… They might not need her anymore.”

“The Nephilim? Jack?”

“Lucifer’s boy,” Elizabeth confirmed with a nod.

“I thought Heaven wanted him dead.”

“They did, but that was before they had a use for him. I think they’re willing to set aside their protocol if it means avoiding tangling themselves with someone like _Rowena MacLeod_. At least the kid has angelic grace, you know? It’s something. A tether, I suppose. I could be wrong on that—I’ve been a bit preoccupied. All I know is that they have the Nephilim up there, he’s alive, and they want it like that. Wish I could do more.”

“How do they know he can open the Cage?”

“Is there anything that boy _can’t_ do?”

“I’m a little confused, Elizabeth. We were under the impression Heaven didn’t have any leads on Jack.”

“Well, we didn’t at first. We went to that bunker in Lebanon, Kansas, to find him, but he put up one hell of a fight. We lost him. And, recently, he’s been found and brought up to Anael,” Elizabeth informed.

“How recently?”

“It’s been a few days now. But that’s where my intel ends, I’m afraid. I’ve been holed up with the demons for the last week.”

Meanwhile, in the basement, Castiel and Hunter would find none other than the mother of the former King of Hell herself.

She instantly recognized Castiel and raised an eyebrow. “Angel,” she said. “It’s been a little while, my boy,” she chuckled.

“Rowena,” Castiel replied stiffly.

“Come to help a dear old friend?”

“Ideally, I’d leave you here.”

“Rude.”

“ _But_ , as it turns out, you’re of use. So, yes. We’re here to free you,” Castiel sighed, approaching her and undoing her binds as Mary had done Elizabeth’s.

“Who’s your boy-toy?” Rowena asked, eyeing Hunter.

“His name is Hunter Aaron. He’s a prophet.”

“A _prophet_. As I live and breathe. Honored, truly,” she said to Hunter with a self-satisfied grin as the binds fell to her feet.

“Ignore her,” Castiel told Hunter, rolling his eyes.

Hunter’s muscles were tense.

The now-trio headed upstairs, where they were met with the rest of their party, which now included Elizabeth.

“We’ve multiplied,” Dean remarked, looking the group over. He nodded to Mary. “Who’s the girl?”

“Nice to see you too, Dean Winchester,” Rowena sighed.

“Her name’s Elizabeth. She’s an angel,” Mary said, as everyone collectively tacitly agreed to ignore Rowena’s taunting.

“Don’t you want to know how I’m alive?” Rowena prodded.

Dean gave in. “You’re like a cockroach—you and your son. I almost expected _him_ to turn up too,” he scoffed. “Of _course_ you’re still alive. This season’s shaping up to be a right gathering of people I needed to stay dead. You. Bela. I have half a mind to expect Lucifer to join the party.”

“Lucifer’s dead?” Rowena asked. She paused for a second. “My _son_ is dead?”

“You’ve been gone awhile.”

“Evidently,” she scoffed. “Lucifer, I won’t miss. As for Fergus, I’m torn. He was such a pain, but he was a pain that I birthed.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

The split ended up as Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Hunter in the Impala while the three women took Mary’s car. Both were dead silent the entire drive. After all, there was plenty to discuss back at the bunker; they needn’t rush.


	13. Iniquity is One of the Perks

Farrah was still in American Falls during the Winchesters’ (and Hunter and Castiel’s) escapade to Lawrence. And for a period of time following the adventure. During the time, she halted any and all communication with either of her alliances. She’d, as a matter of fact, intentionally ditched her cell phone—though she still knew its whereabouts—and dimmed the resonances of angel radio. She wanted to drop off the grid temporarily. She’d fly on the radar again once she had all of her little, chaotic ducklings in a row.

It would seem to those out of her loop that she’d have no reason to stay in American Falls. If she wanted to avoid Heaven and the Winchesters, there was a long list of other places she could be than where she’d left off with everyone. But she had a reason to stay in town.

His name was Peter Blake.

After all—who would have saved him from the church massacre?

As it was, after Castiel had left the site, she’d quickly, amidst the calamity, talked Peter Blake through exactly what was happening, exactly what he was to do, and, most importantly, exactly what he was not to do. He listened, and, like she promised him, he’d gotten out of there still alive and fully autonomous.

Since then, the pair had grown rather trusting of one another. Peter Blake used Farrah as his door into faith; Farrah used Peter as her foothold on her humanity, for lack of a better word. Common knowledge says angels shouldn’t have any to begin with.

After a few days, Farrah brought to Peter a major concern of hers. In fact, this issue was the primary reason for her temporary disappearance.

Noah’s grace was beginning to dull inside her. If she wanted to keep her angelic tether on this side of the rift, she needed to replenish it. However, she was at an impasse with herself; any new grace she took would inevitably burn out like Noah’s was. And, if she kept going down the path she was, eventually Heaven, the Winchesters, or both would catch up to her. So, she needed to tap out for a moment to figure out her play.

Peter Blake, though new to the scene, was the one who had the brilliant idea in the first place.

If Farrah wanted to sustain herself on a grace that wouldn’t fade out, “It needs to be… _Farrah’s_ ,” he said, proposing his plan.

“Right, that’s the problem, Peter. _My_ grace is the only one that’s actually compatible. The problem is, it’s… out-of-date. It’s not in sync with Heaven.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t understand what game you’re playing,” she scoffed. “This was all preestablished, Peter. No need to repeat it to me when _I_ told you everything in the first place.” She began to pace impatiently across the motel room she and Peter were lodging in together. It was a habit she’d learned working with Raphael under their dear brother Michael so long ago.

Peter sighed. “Stop.”

“My pacing is hurting no one.”

“Your need for grace _is_.”

“Thank you, Peter. You’re an inspiration, truly.”

“Farrah, stop and look at me.”

She sighed irritably, but she listened, stopping in front of him and crossing her arms. “What do you want?”

“If you need a grace to tie you to this version of Heaven, and if you need a grace that’s _yours_ for it to last, then go for the one that fits both bills.”

“Be less cryptic, Peter. I understand I usually speak like that, but I’m irritable, flustered, and… iniquitous, and this is not the time. Be straightforward.”

“Right. To put it bluntly, you find your doppelgänger and take _her_ grace,” Peter replied with a casual shrug, sitting down on the edge of one of the beds. “Problem solved,” he added as he laid back with a deep exhale.

Farrah narrowed her eyes at him as she thought over his proposal. “You bloody genius,” she said slowly. “I think you’re onto something.”

“I try.”

“I knew I saved your ass from heavenly annihilation—and/or possession—for a reason, Peter Blake,” she praised.

“Again, I try. Now, I’m new to this, so it’s possible I could be wrong. But it _sounds_ plausible, so that’s good enough for me.”

Farrah sighed, sitting on the other bed. “Here’s to hoping that you’re right. If I take her grace, I want it to be the last.”

“And if I’m wrong, and your double’s grace burns out too?”

“I’m highly considering burning out with it.”

“Talk of suicide is unbecoming of a savior.”

“Alright, fine. I mean, I’m considering giving up the whole sha-bang if this doesn’t go to plan,” she clarified, her voice low.

“Meaning what, Farrah?”

“It’s stressful playing ball for two teams, Peter. Three, really, if you count my own… admittedly terrible interests. It’s like I’m _always_ up to bat these days. Sometimes a girl needs to be benched for a second. I feel like I’m striking my own pitches, if you catch my drift.”

“Found our way to baseball analogies now, have we?”

“I’m exhausted, Peter.”

“But here you are anyway, kicking it in the ass.”

“For now,” she scoffed. “But when does it _end_ , Peter Blake? I feel rather entitled to a break, if I do say.”

“Don’t we all?”

“But I’m beginning to believe that if karma herself won’t let me catch one, then it’s high time I take it my damn self.”

“Interesting philosophy.”

“It’s not just philosophy, Peter; it’s a promise. The second my double’s grace begins to burn out, I’m calling it quits somewhere. On which team, however, I haven’t fully decided. I’m leaning towards the boys and Castiel. Anael’s fine, but she’s got nothing on the three of them. Besides, I’m an angel. If anyone’s had enough of Heaven, it’s me.”

“And if it doesn’t burn out?”

“Same old song and dance, Peter.”

“Right,” he said. “Well, angel, if you’d like to get the ball rolling on… either of those options, might I suggest telling me how to summon?”

“You _summon_ a demon, you twit.”

“And an angel?”

“For us, you pray. There _are_ rituals we could perform, but that’s not ideal.”

“Prayers are statistically largely unanswered.”

“Because you people pray for dumb shit,” Farrah scoffed.

“Right, naturally. Anyway, that said, how do we expect her to come just because we call if angels don’t have a habit of answering?”

“She’ll come because Heaven wants to keep track of its assets. I’m one of them. And I’ve been missing for days now. Besides, after the stunt I pulled bailing your ass out, I’d be absolutely amazed if they didn’t worship at your altar for a chance to give you a passenger.”

Peter inclined his chin. “You’re sure?”

“How else should Heaven know what exactly those troublesome Winchester boys and their Public Enemy Number One are up to with the current prophet?”

“Fair point.”

“I’m their inside source, Peter. They need me. Farrah~ will come. Rest assured.”

After a few minutes of direction from his angel comrade, Peter finally successfully prayed for Farrah’s~ presence. Sure enough…

“ _Anna_?” Farrah~ exclaimed upon seeing her double. “You’ve been in _Idaho_ the whole time? What’s gotten into you? Do you _know_ what’s on upstairs?”

“Same old, same old, I assume,” Farrah scoffed. “Sorry, I got sidetracked. But everything is _fine_. Trust me.”

Farrah~ pursed her lips. “Have you heard the news?”

“I’ve been out of the loop recently.”

“Heaven got itself a satanic little upgrade,”

“Beg pardon? Satanic? Jesus Christ Almighty. Angels batting for Hell; demons batting for Heaven. Is this a war or a bad soap opera?”

“Demons?” Farrah~ scoffed. “No, Anna— _Nephilim_.”

“The kid climbed the pearly staircase?”

“More like he was forcibly taken up the prison ladder.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to need to interject. Who in hell is Anna?” Peter asked, looking between the two angels.

“Peter Blake,” Farrah~ noted dryly. She looked back to Farrah. “Interesting choice playing house with a heretic.”

“ _Former_ heretic,” Peter corrected.

“Right. So much better.”

Farrah rolled her eyes. “Peter, the angels call me Anna to avoid confusing the two of us,” she informed. She looked to her double. “Mind being a little more cordial? I saved this man from that bloodbath you lot created. Or, really, from one of them. You all sure do love mass murdering your evangelicals in your own cult-houses, don’t you? Interesting tactics.”

“Oh, we know you did,” Farrah~ replied, her voice now tense as she sidestepped Farrah’s insults. “Anael wanted a word with you on that, actually. She didn’t appreciate it.”

“It’s one person.”

“Who could possibly be a strong vessel.”

“And if he’s not?”

“You know what happens when they can’t contain us, Anna.”

“Oh, I do. And I think I was right to have saved him from that possibility.”

“Too bad angels are soldiers and not guardians, Anna. We need you to focus. Has being around that… _insufferable_ Castiel and his merry band of aggravators done something to your brain?” She had a face of mock concern.

“Angels. Condescending, the lot of you.”

“You’re one of us.”

“Regrettably so,” Farrah scoffed.

“You really ought to think twice before severing ties here, Anna. Miss Anael will not go easy on treason.”

“Stop talking already,” Farrah growled. She pulled out her blade and, before her alternate knew what was happening, drew it across Farrah’s~ neck, watching almost entrancedly as the blue-white light of her grace glistened from the wound.

Peter watched in awe as Farrah took the grace for her own.

Farrah’s~ body fell to the floor.

Farrah sighed, looking it over. “We’re going to need an alibi… Good luck with that, Peter. If you need me, I’ll be absolutely anywhere but here and with a different cell phone number. It’s been real, though. I’m rooting for you, kid.” And, with that, she left, leaving Peter alone to deal with the inevitable wrath of Heaven once the news got out.


	14. That Delectable Little Whiff of Defiance

“One more time,” Sam said, pacing around the chair in the dungeon to which they’d bound Rowena. They’d been trying to pry information out of her for days at this point, and had, as per usual, been unsuccessful. However, as she was growing restless and had no real conflict with the Winchesters—at the present, naturally—she thought it best to give them the intel they sought and be on her way. As such, she’d begun to cooperate, although reservedly. Rowena would hardly be Rowena if she were easy to work with. She was looking up at Sam, Dean, and Castiel, fully unbothered and wearing a smirk they’d seen far too many times. “You’re teamed up with _Heaven_?”

“As fate would have it, I owe Anael a favor,” Rowena replied. “I’ll spare you the details, my boys. It’s not important. Besides, rather the angels than Bela Talbot. I thought my _son_ was bad at that job, but the pit found a way to replace him with someone even _less_ qualified than him,” she scoffed, shaking her head. “So, yes, unlikely as it sounds. I’ve been helping Anael. You know those tree-toppers are looking to raise the archangel Michael from Lucifer’s Cage? Who do you think they’d need to do that, exactly? They might have their little Nephilim, but even his powers have their limits. With witchcraft, there are really no bounds if you know what you’re doing.”

“We were told Jack wasn’t in Heaven.”

“And where did you hear that?”

“An angel. Named Farrah.”

“The foreign one or the original one?”

“The foreign one.”

“Oh, you didn’t know? She hasn’t been up to Heaven since she tagged along with _you_ people to Idaho.”

“That was days ago.”

“Right you are. And a lot can happen in days, Sam Winchester. Heaven caught Lucifer’s spawn and brought him up the stairway. Haven’t heard from her since, actually. Anael’s been driving herself mad thinking that girl’s out spreading secrets. Of course, I wouldn’t know too much. I’m only repeating the gossip; the angels brought me on board after she had already gone MIA.”

“If she’s not in Heaven, then where the hell is she?” Dean asked, abrasive.

“Don’t ask me. The angels assumed she hung back with you. Evidently, that’s not the case, so it would seem you’re all looking for her now. Perhaps the girl has simply gone missing. Couldn’t much blame her. Must be difficult being tugged at by you three and by all of Heaven. Of _course_ she disappeared on you.”

“Fantastic,” Dean scoffed.

“Lighten up, Dean-o. Don’t you remember who you’re talking to? If it’s an angel you want, I can bring her to you.”

“And why would you help?”

Rowena shrugged. “You people pulled me out of captivity, didn’t you? Least I can do is retrieve your runaway angel friend. It’s not too complicated a process; just a simple Enochian spell, and I can have her at your feet in no time.” She looked over to Castiel. “I’m sure your _other_ angel friend could attest to that. So here’s the deal, boys: I get you Farrah, and you let me off a free witch.” She tensed her posture and inclined her chin, looking between the Winchesters.

“Sure. Fine,” Sam agreed.

Rowena displayed the supernatural handcuffs on her wrists. “I can’t very well summon an angel with these things on my wrists, now can I?”

Dean rolled his eyes before taking the key from his back pocket and undoing the handcuffs for her.

“Thank you,” she said. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes, letting a moment’s silence pass. Just when the Winchesters thought she was going to perform her ritual, she broke the atmosphere and asked, “So am I to just bring her here without a trap set? I don’t expect anything fancy from the three of you, but I’m surprised you haven’t made a ring of Holy Fire. You know the girl I’m summoning here has wings, yes? What if she vanishes on you again?”

“Why would I do that?” Farrah’s voice asked stiffly as the doors to the dungeon opened behind them.

“Imagine that,” Rowena scoffed. She raised an eyebrow. “Guess I don’t need to do the spell after all.” Now that the handcuffs were off, she was able to drop the binds without moving an inch. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be showing myself out.”

She was gone before there could be protests.

Such as it was, there wouldn’t have been any protests regardless. Farrah’s turning up had created quite enough of a distraction.

“You look perturbed,” Farrah noted as she looked between the men. “Come on. Get it out. I know you’ve been waiting.”

“What the _hell_ were you doing?” Dean asked.

“Incidentally, trying to make everyone’s lives easier here,” she scoffed. She brushed by them and assumed a seat where Rowena had been. Noticing the quizzical looks she was getting, she added, “What? You were going to do it yourselves, weren’t you?”

Dean shrugged and took a few steps towards her. Knowing what to expect, she extended her arms to allow him to put the cuffs to her wrists.

“I’m here to come clean,” she informed once Dean had resumed his post in the lineup. “I haven’t exactly been the _best_ team player as of late, but I’m working on it. I assume Castiel told you what happened at the church in Idaho.”

“He told us,” Dean confirmed.

“What Castiel _doesn’t_ know is that Peter Blake walked out untouched because of me. I spared the man. And since you left Idaho, that’s where I’ve been—with Peter. See, the angel radio thing became a predicament again, and I wanted to get it sorted out without adding more problems to your ever-growing list.”

“How is that possible? I thought you got it worked out upstairs.”

“I didn’t,” she scoffed. “I tethered myself to their frequencies using their grace. An angel named Noah, specifically. I met him in Philadelphia. Decent angel, actually; very communicative, very helpful. I stole his grace in cold blood and offed the poor boy—and, to set the record straight, this was _well_ before I went up to Heaven the first time. Truth be told, I wasn’t confident in that decision, and I was unsure how this conversation would turn out. So I chose to act like it wasn’t… a concern. Or, at least, to act like it was a concern that I could solve in a… less barbaric manner than I did. And it was coming along swimmingly until it started to burn out. Not sure how familiar the lot of you are with stolen grace, but it’s very… temperamental. It doesn’t have the longest shelf-life. I managed to keep it up longer than average because I still had my own. I wouldn’t have died once his grace was gone, but I would have lost connection. And Peter Blake—the brilliant man he is—suggested I take Farrah’s~. That’s Farrah~ as in my alternate. And that’s exactly what I did. I hid out with Peter in American Falls, and he prayed for her to come down. When she showed, we had a nice little chat about my disappearing act—wasn’t exactly popular with the angels, either, so you’re aware—and then, once I was through talking to her, I slit her throat and… well, _absorbed_ her grace, I suppose. Consumed. Devoured. Call it whatever you’d like, but her grace and mine are now one in the same. Again—this was Peter Blake’s genius, not my own. I don’t want credit for his brilliance. My plan was to simply take players off the board indefinitely and hope no one found out. His plan was… cleaner. More efficient.”

Sam, Dean, and Castiel were silent.

“For the record, I think he might have been correct. From the jump even, her grace seems far more stable with mine.”

“Good to know,” Dean replied, unamused.

“I know the circumstance isn’t ideal. It’s not ideal for Heaven either, believe me. But it’s out in the open now.”

“And that excuses it?”

“Absolutely not,” Farrah admitted. “But I’d rather you know of my transgressions. It’s a lot easier than hiding it all the time.”

“Anything else you been hiding, Farrah?”

“Actually, no, there is not. Not from you, at least. If you mean whether I’ve been hiding anything from Heaven, it’s a far different story.”

“Rowena and Elizabeth said you hadn’t checked in up there in awhile.”

“Rowena and Elizabeth would be correct, then,” she replied coolly. She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s Rowena?”

“Rowena MacLeod. She’s a witch. She’s helping break Michael out of the Cage,” Sam informed her.

“This is something you would have known if you hadn’t been running around Idaho stealing grace for the last week and a half,” Dean scoffed.

“Thank you, mother,” Farrah growled. “I assumed there would have been developments in Heaven. I’m going to check in once we’re done here.”

“Maybe they’ll be more excited to see you.”

“They won’t be,” Farrah assured. “Especially not now, since my alternate has gone dark. Still haven’t worked out an alibi.”

“And if they kill you?”

“They might. But I left Peter with the body in Idaho. I think they’ll be more inclined to take a swing at him than me. Besides, they had a target on him before I stopped them. If anything, this is setting fate back in alignment.”

“Ever the saint, Farrah.”

“Look, I made mistakes. I’m fixing them. Once the situation with Peter and my alternate—and potentially Noah, if anyone makes the connection—blows over, everything will be back to normal. I’ll play both sides and give you all the insight you want.”

“Did you hear they have Jack up there now?”

Farrah narrowed her eyes. “Yes, now that you mention it. My alternate said they dragged him up there. Apparently, Nephilim grace _is_ strong enough to keep their soul alive in Heaven. Who would have guessed?”

“So where does that put us, Farrah?”

“I’ll find a way to break him out after I settle things with Anael. I’d need an excuse, so they don’t destroy our whole system after they discover I’m a traitor. And by ‘destroy the system’ I’m not talking simply turning me loose to powwow with you lot in a fortified bunker while they do with the Nephilim what they see fit and act like we’re not alive. I mean they’ll slaughter me—all of us. High treason and whatever else. It’s a whole bloody ordeal.”

“Pin it on me,” Castiel suggested. “Bring me up there with you.”

“They’ll never allow you to cross the threshold,” she sighed.

“Then say I’m your captive. Bring me to Heaven, and I’ll deal with myself and Jack while you work everything else out with Anael. Trust me, Farrah; I’ve been around this block multiple times. How did you think Jofiel and I got into Heaven to bust you out? It works every time.”

Farrah bit her lip anxiously, distracting herself with the memory of Jofiel for a quick second before clearing her throat and looking back up to Castiel. “Fine.”

“Do we get any say in this?” Dean asked with a scoff. “Because, personally, I’m not a fan,” he said, crossing his arms.

“Of course you’re not a fan.”

“Dean, let us do this,” Castiel commanded.

Dean pursed his lips. “And if things go wrong and they slaughter the both of you for the hell of it?”

“I doubt they’ll kill her,” Castiel said in attempt to provide reassurance. “I can’t guarantee my _own_ safety, but that’s an average day, isn’t it? Besides, it’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing, Dean. How many times have I broken into Heaven now?”

“Too damn many.”

“Well, in that case, how much does it really hurt to add one more?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Fine. But I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it for it to work, Dean,” Farrah said with a shrug. “That’s the nice thing about espionage.”

“This isn’t just ‘espionage,’ Farrah,” Dean scoffed. “This is actively using one prisoner to break out another prisoner.”

“I’ll get my hands dirty if I need to,” Farrah said. “Ideally, I won’t have to, so we can maintain the tie to both you and Heaven. But if it comes down to it, I will gladly put myself on Anael’s hitlist to get Castiel and Jack back here. Better now?”

“I’ll answer that when I see who comes out of this.”

“Fair enough,” she conceded. She held her hands out to him. “If you don’t mind, it’s hard to get anything done with my powers inhibited.”

Reluctant but compliant, he undid the handcuffs. “Don’t screw it up.”

“Your confidence is rousing, really. Trust us, it’ll work out one way or another,” she said. She gave them a smirk before she put her hand on Castiel’s shoulder and flew both up to Heaven.


	15. I'm Talking Biblical Negative

It had taken a decently long time, as usual with that sort of thing, but Leigh Rose had finally translated the angel tablet. At least the part that they’d need to get from one plain of reality into the next.

After giving the prophetess some time to recuperate, the group finally decided to get the ball rolling.

“What do we need, Leigh?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know how you expect to find _any_ of this,” the prophetess scoffed as she scanned her list one more time.

“We’ll manage it. I’ve got a Garrison ready to head out as we speak. They’ll leave as soon as I tell them what they’re after.”

“Fine. According to the tablet, you need the grace of an archangel—”

“Check,” Hannah interrupted. “Either one of those two has us covered there,” she told Leigh Kennedy, gesturing towards Lucifer and Raphael.

“Right. Naturally. Anyway, besides that, you need a fruit from the Tree of Life, the bone of a Righteous Man, holy water, virgin lamb’s blood, and the blood of a Most Holy Man,” Leigh finished. “So if you’ve got that lying about, I suppose it’s a go.”

“That’s it?” Lucifer scoffed. “Please. That’s nothing.”

“A fruit from the Tree of Life sounds complicated to me,” Leigh replied stiffly. “I mean, those aren’t exactly the most common thing.”

“Lucifer’s right, Leigh,” Hannah said. “Especially with a whole Garrison out there fetching these things, we should have the ingredients in no time at all.”

“And then what?”

“We perform the ritual, silly.”

“How?”

“Spells are hardly complicated, honey. Follow the instructions. You’re a prophetess; it’s your divine ability.”

“You expect _me_ to follow _these_ directions and open a rift in time and space?” Leigh asked in surprise, taking a step back.

“That we do.”

“You’re all crazy, then,” Leigh chuckled lightly, though out of fear and shock rather than bemusement.

“You translated the Word of God, Leigh Kennedy. What’s a little divine ritual to you after that?” Raphael asked.

Leigh sighed. “I’ll give it a shot. But when I fuck it up and we need to start from scratch, don’t blame me.”

“Then who are we to blame, Leigh Rose? You would be at fault.”

“Blame yourselves for making me try my hand at it. Hell, blame dear God for dragging me into this whole mess.”

“You’re right— _God_ put you here. He had your name on that list since before you were an idea in your mother’s mind, Leigh Rose.”

“That’s his mistake, not mine.”

“God doesn’t make mistakes, sweetie.”

“He is, after all, _God_ ,” Hannah added.

“Yes, Hannah. She gets it.”

“And He thinks I’d be capable of opening rifts to alternate dimensions? I’m sorry. I can only suspend my disbelief so much, Raphael,” Leigh sighed.

“Look at where you are, my dear prophetess. You are in _Heaven_. With _angels_. With the Devil himself! And you think you’re in a position to be heretical?”

“I think that if God thought I’d be where I am right now, He would never have put my name in circulation.”

“That is where you’re wrong, Leigh Kennedy. You see, you were an atheist before this. You didn’t know God. Now, us—me and my siblings knew nothing _but_ God until He left. His choice to put you up for prophethood came with the knowledge you’d land here.”

“So He damned me before I had the chance to be born. Is that what you’re telling me? And I should give a damn what His wishes are?”

“Absolutely you should,” Hannah affirmed.

“You might not have had faith in Him, Leigh Kennedy. But He extended that favor to you,” Raphael said coolly.

“Right. Thank you, pastor. I’m so glad I came to church today,” Leigh mocked, rolling her eyes at Raphael’s sentiment.

“I tried this the nice way,” Raphael said, looking to Hannah and Lucifer. He directed his attention back to Leigh Rose. “Get over yourself.”

“ _Me_ get over _myself_? Some nerve you’ve got, Raphael.”

“I’m an archangel, prophetess. I’m allowed to have nerve. You’ve been given a task—a divine prophecy, some may say. Fulfill it, damn it.”

Leigh sighed. “I’ll give it a go.”

“That’s my girl,” Lucifer praised.

“But like I said, when I fuck up, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“You’re a prophetess of the Lord performing a spell you translated directly from the Word of God. You’ll get it right,” Raphael assured.

Hannah had sent her command out through the radio. As such, by the time they had convinced Leigh Kennedy to play her part, the ingredients were already in their possession.

“Look’s like it’s time we give this a whirl,” Hannah said, taking the ingredients from the angels as they appeared. Once she had everything, she looked back and forth between Lucifer and Raphael. “Who’s donating?”

Raphael decided to step up to the plate, though it took a bit of discussion. Ultimately, he was fine with it; they wouldn’t be extracting it all anyhow.

Leigh Rose followed the directions from the tablet with painstaking attention to detail for fear of getting it incorrect. She would read and reread how she was to handle the ingredients. She had forced one of Hannah’s underlings to retrieve her a pair of sterile gloves to avoid adding anything else to the mix. She wanted everything to go accordingly because she had no desire to have to redo the spell with the weight of Heaven’s judgment on her shoulders.

She had all the ingredients together in a large ceramic bowl, with the exception of the portion of Raphael’s grace. As she poured it in gently, she recited an Enochian incantation, surprising herself with her own ability to understand the language of celestials.

It took a second, but everyone in the room felt a pulse before, in front of their very eyes, a thin, golden line started drawing itself into existence. It was bursting with light and energy—a manifestation of a spell followed with accuracy.

Leigh Kennedy, amazed at her achievement, eyed the rift with awe, her eyes wide and her mouth agape. “Is that the rift?” she asked, knowing what the response was going to be but still refusing to believe what she’d done.

“You did it, you brilliant little prophetess,” Hannah exclaimed, taking Leigh Rose in an embrace. “That, my girl, is a tear in spacetime.”

“Wicked,” Leigh breathed.

Lucifer was less awestricken than the rest of them, having seen and travelled through the tear himself in the past. “What are you waiting for?” he scoffed. “Let’s cross through.”

Raphael was the first to approach the rift. “What do we do, Lucifer?”

“Just touch the damn thing. It’ll do the rest for you.”

Raphael gave the devil a quick nod before straightening his shoulders and putting his hand to the tear, finding himself in another reality before he could finish blinking.

After witnessing Raphael disappear in a burst of light, Leigh Rose was the next to approach and travel through the rift. She was followed by Hannah and then by Lucifer. They had left the directions to close the rift, which Leigh had found in the tablet as well, on the desk in the Control Room and commanded Bartholomew to make sure it was shut. As it was.

Raphael inhaled deeply, as Farrah had when she’d found herself in this timeline, looking at the world around him and seeing colors in more shades than Apocalypse. _This_ was a kingdom worth fighting for. Besides, their Heaven was in, relatively speaking, given its past, good hands. Bartholomew would assume the throne in Raphael’s absence. He was well-liked enough.

Meanwhile, the Heaven on that side of the rift was doing its own spellcasting. Rowena had fled back to Anael after escaping the Winchesters. Lucifer’s Cage had opened precisely the same time the rift had.

A flight of angels was down in Hell, eyeing the Cage with awe and fear, as Raphael, Hannah, and Leigh Kennedy had eyed the rift. As per usual in Hell, thunder and lightning were in such abundance the flock had tuned them out entirely. They waited patiently as Rowena was performing her spell.

Michael, deranged and broken as he was, was still himself enough to notice what was going on around him. The Cage wasn’t fond of breaking open; there was an environmental reaction down in the pit as the lightning grew increasingly violent.

Still, Rowena, powerful witch that she was—after all, she had been able to survive crossing into Heaven off a spell of her own craft—overrode Hell’s protections, and the lock was opened on the Cage, allowing the group of angels to flood inside and retrieve their long-lost archangel brother from his captivity at last.

Rowena and Anael stood in Heaven. Rowena had finished her ritual; now was just a matter of waiting for the angels to return home with their rightful King.

However, timing had it that they were met with a different missing person before they encountered Michael, as Farrah flew herself up to Heaven and greeted Anael like an old friend, as if nothing had happened.

“Anael,” she said with a polite nod. She looked at Rowena. “And you are?”

“Rowena MacLeod,” Rowena replied with a smirk, her chin on an incline. “And _you’re_ the Winchesters’ new pet Farrah.”

“Guilty as charged. The boys told me a little about you actually. Didn’t imagine you being so… ginger. I’m impressed. How do you get your hair so—”

“Where have you been?” Anael asked sharply.

“It’s not—I apologize for my inconsistency,” Farrah said. She originally was going to insist her whereabouts weren’t of Anael’s concern, a tongue she’d adopted after how her business with her last boss had gone. However, she knew now was not the time. She needed to keep on Anael’s good side. And, for Castiel’s sake, she needed to keep the conversation going to stop Anael somehow disrupting his mission. So she took a different approach.

“As you ought to,” Anael scoffed. “You’re difficult to work with, you know that? You’re feisty. You vanish. You don’t communicate. You go on long tangents that have _nothing_ important to say—Rowena’s hair? _That’s_ the priority?”

“My old Heaven was not… big on dependability, you could say. It was a very… independent environment. The only one who ever had much to do in the way of communication was Michael—or Castiel~, or Hester, depending on who that dick archangel preferred to have at his side on a given day. The rest of us… were kind of in the wind, I suppose. Your ship is far more structured, more scheduled than his ever was—I’m not used to the rigor. But I’m very grateful for the chance you’ve given me. Between you and me, I wouldn’t trust anyone over there as far as I could throw them. There’s a reason I hopped to your side of the interdimensional portal, after all. So, again, my sincerest apologies. I’ll work on it.”

“You will. I don’t know _what’s_ going on, but there have been alarms sounding today that haven’t sounded in… ever.”

“I heard them too. Felt some strange pulses also.”

“So have the rest of the angels.”

“Any idea what it could be?”

“We’re trying to work that out. And it would be much easier to deal with _that_ problem if _you_ quit being an additional problem, Farrah."

“Why do you say ‘Farrah’ when I thought I was to be called ‘Anna’?” Farrah asked, though she already knew what the answer would be.

“There’s no need to distinguish. Your alternate is deceased. She was found slaughtered in American Falls, Idaho. Peter Blake, that man you saved from the church—he prayed for her, and this was how he repaid her favor of answering. Congratulations on your impeccable taste in men, Farrah,” Anael scorned. “We think he may have been connected with Noah’s disappearing from Philadelphia awhile back. Did you know about that?”

“Absolutely not, Anael. Sorry to hear it.”

“It’s of no import now. The boy has been laid to waste.”

Farrah cleared her throat. “Right. Of course. A just conclusion to this… heinous tale,” she said, saving face.

“Hindsight is 20/20, Farrah. Next time you want to play heroine and save a target vessel—don’t do that.”

“Noted.”

“In fact, I think it’d be good you started to base your judgment off my _own_ principles, not yours. Whatever system you have in place doesn’t seem to be doing you much good around here. You’d do well to see to it that you get in gear.”

“Understood.”

“That means promptly, Farrah.”

“Loud and clear.”

“Is it all the time you’ve spent with the Winchesters? Are they having a bad impact on your discipline, Farrah?”

“Certainly not.”

“Perhaps it’s that damned Castiel rubbing off on you. He’s… quite the talker, the influencer. He’s not corrupting you, is he?”

“I came corrupted, Anael.”

“That is not comforting, Farrah.”

“I came like this, Anael,” Farrah corrected. “Simply adapted to a different work environment. It’s a learning curve is all. I’ll get better, I swear. This has nothing to do with Castiel. He’s been… manageable, really. They’re no problem to me.”

“Good. That’s a valuable resource for us to have.”

“I’m sure it is. It’s always good you keep close tabs on your enemies. What’s the saying? Friends close, enemies closer? Although, really, they aren’t putting up too much of a fight.”

“The Winchesters and Castiel are _always_ looking to put up a fight, Farrah.”

“Of course.”

“But I’m glad that’s your perception; you’ve spent infinitely more time with them, of course. That means we can focus all our efforts into this… conflict with Hell.”

“Wonderful.”

After a moment of pause, the angels returned, fresh from Hell with their revered archangel brother.

“I think we may have just won the war,” Anael said with a smirk, looking back and forth between Rowena and Farrah.

“I’m thrilled,” Farrah said, surprised that her voice didn’t break under the weight of her deception.


	16. You and I Both Know It Ain't Pretty

While Anael, Rowena, and Farrah were preoccupied with Michael, Castiel, as promised, had been snuck into Heaven and was getting to work on finding and rescuing his surrogate Nephilim son from whatever heavenly (admittedly, not an ideal word) prison he was held in.

He had been found out almost immediately upon Farrah’s arrival with him, as per the plan.

She flew them up together, making sure to land herself squarely in front of the guards to Heaven’s prison. Before catching the attention of the guards, she leaned in to ask Castiel, “You know what you’re doing, right?”

“I’ve got a vague idea,” Castiel replied. “It’ll be fine.”

“Right. Well, drop a line if you need anything,” she said. At that point, the guards were nearing them, so she cleared her throat, inclined her chin, and straightened her posture while Castiel did the best of his ability to look infuriated. “Johal, Tyriel,” she greeted coolly. “I’ve brought someone I think Anael might be interested in.”

Johal looked at her with a satisfied smirk. “I thought you were supposed to act like his ally,” he said.

“You’ve been radio silent for days, and now you turn up in Heaven with Castiel?” Tyriel asked, his eyes narrow.

“Right. I, uh—the Winchesters and I mutually agreed it was high time we return Castiel home. He’s got a lot to answer for. It took some manipulation, but I figured bringing in your highest fugitive would help calm the waters after my disappearing act. I was willing to do just about _anything_ to see his ass locked up,” Farrah improvised. Her hand was still on Castiel’s shoulder, and he could feel her vice grip tightening as she thought up her alibi. “I thought maybe our past experience would help me to stomach his presence day-in, day-out, but I was, evidently, wrong. I’m not—I can’t deal with him anymore. So I needed to get him here instead. One less fugitive in play, yes?”

“This is ridiculous,” Castiel scoffed. He faked like he was going to fight Farrah off of him, knowing that, with how tightly she was holding him, she would be able to catch his drift and follow his lead without letting go.

He was right.

After a short, entirely false struggle with one another, Farrah and Castiel stopped, Castiel now at his knees, acting hurt though he was entirely uninjured.

“Take him, why don’t you? Anael’s going to want to talk to me,” Farrah urged, looking between Tyriel and Johal.

The two guards did as directed, each one taking one of Castiel’s arms. Together, they lifted him to his feet, though, naturally, they were far more hostile about his being in their hands than Farrah had been.

“Imagine that. Heaven’s prison, home of the great Castiel and the demon spawn of Satan. Business hasn’t been this good since Gadreel let the snake into the Garden of Eden,” Tyriel said with a chuckle.

“Spawn of Satan?” Castiel asked as if oblivious.

“Don’t talk,” Johal commanded. “Make it easier on all of us.”

They found a vacant cell and tossed their inmate inside, locking the gate and leaving the prison with pleasure.

Now was where the improvisation needed to step up a notch. He was here, and he knew Jack was here. But he was unsure how to get them out.

Frankly, this part was poorly thought out.

“Jack,” he said, quiet enough to not disturb Tyriel and Johal nearby but loud enough to be heard cell to cell. “Jack, it’s Castiel. I’m here to… rescue you… I suppose,” he said, though realizing more as time went by how futile this endeavor was looking.

“Rescue me?” Jack asked from a cell a few gates down from Castiel. “But you are locked up here too, Castiel.”

“It’s a work in progress,” Castiel admitted.

“Well, did you have a plan?”

“Yeah. Get into Heaven’s prison, and then get out of Heaven’s prison. I have successfully done one of those things.”

“You have done the easier of those things.”

“Thank you, Jack, for your support.”

“No problem, Castiel.”

“Isn’t there something _you_ can do?”

“No. The cell is warded to inhibit my powers.”

“Jack, not to be rude, but why are you even alive?”

“The angels have a use for me. This is where they keep me when they do not need me to serve it.”

“Do you think rehabilitating a nearly braindead archangel falls under the angels’ use for you?” Castiel asked, beginning to formulate the start of an idea.

“Sure, perhaps. They tap into me when they need more raw power than they have readily available elsewhere.”

“So that sounds like a yes.”

“It would have been a month ago,” Jack said lowly. “But ever since they brought that witch up here—what is her name? Roxanna?—that does not happen nearly as often as it used to. She has me upstaged, it seems.”

“Damn,” Castiel sighed. “Rowena has a way of doing that.”

“Doing what, Castiel?”

“Screwing with people’s plans. Look, Jack, I’ll admit this is a poorly executed rescue mission. But Farrah can really only stall for so long. We need to figure out a way out of here—relatively fast would be ideal.”

“They trust Farrah,” Jack said. “Get her to let us out.”

“We’re trying to avoid that,” Castiel admitted. He paused for a second. “But there might be another way.”

“What do you mean, Castiel?”

“Elizabeth—that’s her name. I’ll contact Elizabeth.”

“Who is Elizabeth?”

Castiel didn’t answer. He was too focused on sending Elizabeth his SOS to respond to Jack’s curiosities.

_This is Castiel. Jack and I are in Heaven’s prison. We need someone to get us out of here. Farrah is with Anael._

“Hopefully she trusts me enough to do something,” Castiel said to Jack after sending out his message.

“You mean you are not sure?”

“She’s a relatively new addition to the collection,” Castiel admitted. “Hell, she might not even like me. It’s anyone’s guess.”

“What if she does not come for us?”

“We figure something else out,” Castiel replied with a casual shrug. “I have everything under control. Worst case scenario, we get Farrah to risk her reputation and her ass to get ours out of here. It’s not an option we _want_ on the table, but it’s an option we _have_ on the table. Regardless, we’re definitely getting out.”

“I have faith in you, Castiel.”

“Good. It’s nice to have a little of that these days.”

The time was passing by, and Elizabeth was still a no-show. Castiel knew it took a bit of time to get to the gate to Heaven, but even so he was growing antsy waiting to see if she had taken their side after all.

“Is Elizabeth on her way?” Jack asked after a few minutes’ wait.

“I’m not sure,” Castiel admitted. “Look, for all I know, she’s still on her way to the sandbox. Not all of us are Farrah, you know.”

“Sandbox?”

“Sorry. The gate to Heaven.”

Their conversation was interrupted when they heard Johal and Tyriel talking to a woman down at the entrance.

“Elizabeth, we really can’t let you in here,” Johal insisted.

“Come on, Johal. Tyriel. I work for Intelligence. If it’s anyone’s place to be in the prison, it’s mine,” Elizabeth prodded.

“What do you need with them?” Tyriel asked.

“What do I—insight, of course. I’m from _Intelligence_ , Tyriel. Think just a little bit. We’re always prodding around the prison. What’s so different this time?”

“You’ve been absent, Elizabeth.”

“Not by choice, I haven’t,” she scoffed. “It’s hardly my fault the demons caught me on that suicide mission we took.”

“Right. And how did you get out again?” Johal asked.

“Rowena MacLeod, of course. You two need to have some more trust in your own kind,” she sighed.

“I think we’re good as we are, Elizabeth.”

“Let me in the damn prison, Johal. I have a job to do. Or, if you’d prefer, you could continue impeding my work, and I’ll make sure Joseph has a nice, long word with you about it. Whatever sounds the best to you.”

The conversation at this point became too quiet for Castiel to be able to pick it up. Instead, he told Jack, “That’s Elizabeth. I told you I had a plan.”

There was a bright light out in the entrance, after which Jack asked, “And she is here to help us?” He sounded distrustful, now more than ever.

“Of course I’m here to help you,” Elizabeth said, running into the prison. As Castiel’s cell was closer to the entrance, his was her first stop. “I figured I owed your group a favor,” she said, preempting his questioning her motives. “And besides, Heaven left me for dead the second those demons had me. To Hell with Heaven.”

“Ironic,” Castiel scoffed.

She gave a small smile as she unlocked his cell for him. She opened his gate and then headed a little deeper into the block to find Jack’s cell. “Hey, little Nephilim,” she greeted as she undid the lock on his gate.

“Hello,” he replied, still wary. He was having a difficult time trusting angels after being taken as their hostage.

“My name’s Elizabeth,” she said. “In case Castiel hasn’t let you know that by now.”

“I am aware.”

All three now stood in the center of the cell block, eyeing one another. “Well,” Elizabeth sighed, letting her gaze drop to the two bodies she left in her wake. “I guess that makes me a fugitive now, too, Castiel.”

“Welcome to the party,” Castiel scoffed. “Come on. Let’s get to the gate and try not to get caught on our way out.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she agreed, leading the way out of the prison.

As they walked through the hallways, Elizabeth and Castiel stood shoulder-to-shoulder and in front of the Nephilim. Each one was holding an angel blade as if their life depended on it, because, frankly, it did.

“Where’s Farrah in all this?” Elizabeth asked. “Mary Winchester told me she was up here somewhere too.”

“She’s keeping Anael occupied,” Castiel informed. “Actually, I’m surprised I haven’t heard from her yet. I didn’t realize anyone could stall this effectively.”

Roughly then was when Michael had been brought up to Heaven. It shook the entirety of the domain to its foundation, whatever, precisely, that was.

“Well, that should help,” Elizabeth scoffed.

“Dear God,” Castiel sighed. “What have the angels done this time?”

“They’ve been so set on bringing back Michael from the Cage. You don’t think _that_ could be what that was, do you?”

Castiel gave it a second of thought before saying, “That’s exactly what I think, Elizabeth. Since they’ve got Rowena MacLeod up here, there’s really nothing in the way of opening Lucifer’s Cage anymore.”

“I assume that’s a problem.”

“Yes, that’s definitely a problem. However, it’s not the _current_ problem.”

“Right. Escape. _Damn_ it, where is door 42?”

Castiel pursed his lips. He stopped in his tracks at the sound of running behind them and towards the end of the hallway. “Elizabeth,” he said, getting her, and Jack by extension, to stop as well. “You get Jack out of here. I’m going to hang back and deal with whoever that is.”

“Castiel, if you die, so help me Father,” she started.

“I won’t die, Elizabeth, please. I’ve been here before.”

“Right. Of course you have. I’ve saddled myself with Heaven’s Most Wanted,” she scoffed. She rolled her eyes at her own reality. “Come back in one piece, at least.”

“That’s a bit harder to promise.”

“Come on, Nephilim,” she said, taking Jack’s hand and heading down the hallway at a faster pace than before.

Almost immediately after they’d gone, Castiel was confronted by two angels.

“Well, would you look at this,” one of them purred as he recognized Castiel. “Little Cassie. Our fugitive brother.”

It took him a second, but he recognized the angels before him as well. The one that had spoken was Jesse. The other was Kenan. He greeted them accordingly before adding, “It’s been awhile since I caused trouble up here. Figured it was about time.”

Kenan dropped an angel blade from his sleeve. “Castiel, you ought to learn your place,” he scoffed.

“Kenan, the only place he’s got is the prison,” Jesse replied, brandishing his own angel blade now.

“Actually, I was _just_ there. You two should pay Tyriel and Johal a visit. They’re not doing too well, I’m afraid,” Castiel taunted.

Kenan moved to drive his blade through Castiel’s torso, but the attempt was easily dodged. It was this that launched the three into a short fight. However, Castiel had taken on worse (hell, he’d taken on worse _in Heaven_ ), so he managed to pull out a swift victory.

He was ready to head out but waited as he heard more footsteps.

“Castiel, what in Father’s name have you done?” It was Farrah, and her tone was more amused than accusatory.

“What can I say? _They_ attacked _me_.”

She shook her head. “Did the kid make it out?”

“Yeah. I called in a favor from another angel. Elizabeth.”

“In that case, come on. Let’s get the hell out of Heaven.”

“Sounds good to me.”

She put her hand on his shoulder as she had done to get them up to Heaven in the first place and flew down to Earth. They made a quick stop at the sandbox to pick up Elizabeth and Jack, who were waiting there for a little while just to see if Castiel ever made it out.

“Elizabeth, Farrah,” Castiel introduced, not entirely sure they knew each other.

The two angels shook hands. “Charmed,” Farrah said.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Elizabeth said coolly.

Farrah pursed her lips. “From whom?”

“Mary Winchester, mostly. That’s where I’ve been getting a lot of my intel. I like the rest of the pack just fine, but she’s the one who actually rescued me.”

“In that case, I’m okay with it. If it had been either of her sons giving you the gossip, I’d have been more concerned.”

With that, all four were flown to the bunker where they were greeted by the four humans that occupied it.

“Sam, Dean, Mary, Hunter,” Farrah greeted. “May I present to you a successful endeavor,” she said with a garish gesture to the group of celestials. “Something’s finally gone our way,” she breathed, taking a seat at the table.

“About time,” Dean scoffed.


	17. Either You Get Good Fast or You Get Dead Faster

“Are you sure this is the best time to drop everything and go on a hunt? Cas and Farrah are in Heaven trying to break Jack out—something could go wrong,” Sam exclaimed, though he didn’t protest too terribly much as he was doing his worrying from the passenger’s seat in the Impala as Dean drove them down the road at double the speed limit.

“Sam, relax. We’re going to Athol. It’s thirty minutes away,” Dean scoffed. “We’ll be close by. But I’d rather be out doing my job than holed up in the bunker worrying about who’s going to come out of this.”

“Fair enough,” Sam sighed. He looked out the window, trying to take Dean’s lead and use the hunt in Athol to distract from the situation in Heaven. Besides, what good did it do him to worry? It wasn’t as if he had a say up there anyway.

“We’re thirty minutes away—not even—hunting a simple vampire case, Sam. Besides, in case you’ve forgotten, _this_ is what we do. We don’t fight wars, we don’t overthrow dictators—we hunt monsters. And it’s about time we get back to doing that.”

“Didn’t we do that in Idaho?”

“That was awhile ago. Plus, it was still part of this whole Heaven-Hell nonsense. American Falls doesn’t count. The last time we had a nice, clean, black-and-white case was… God, back in Maryville, New Hampshire, when we did that haunted house with Jack,” he said, thinking back to the Gordon House. “We’re overdue.”

“Fine,” Sam conceded.

“We’ll be in and out before nightfall,” Dean assured.

To further prove his point, Dean opted to park the Impala at a parking garage rather than bother getting a motel. They climbed out of the Impala and looked around them for a bit before Sam reigned them back in. “So. Vampire.”

“Right. Mom got a tip from one of her hunter pals that there’s a nest in Athol. So, we’re here to take care of it.”

“So it’s vampire _s_. Plural.”

“Vampire _s_. Plural.”

“Good to know.”

“Eh, we’ve been up against worse odds.”

“Not wrong.”

“We just need to find the damn thing.”

“Mom’s hunter friend didn’t leave that with the tip-off?”

“Nah. He’s up in Montana; he wouldn’t know.”

“Wonderful.”

“Relax,” Dean ordered again. “Hunter’s back at the bunker looking through the traffic cameras for us, remember? He’s _got_ to turn up something eventually. Vampires love that roadside hunting trick,” he scoffed.

“And then what?”

“Hopefully he catches a license plate.”

“Sure. But if we’re going to do this right, we get out there and try to find it ourselves. Just in case he can’t catch that license plate.”

Dean smirked. “There’s the Sammy I need.”

Sam shrugged. “It’s a case.”

Together, they headed off down the street, already fully suited and ready to play FBI with the locals. Their first stop, as it tended to be on vampire cases, was a local tavern; vampires loved their nightlife.

They took a seat at the bar and were approached in no time by the bartender, a young woman in a thick pair of glasses and deep red lipstick. “What can I get for you?” she purred, eyeing both brothers with a small smirk.

It was 11 in the morning.

“Grab us a beer. Whatever’s on tap,” Dean said shortly, though he was returning her seductive expression.

Sam rolled his eyes as his brother watched the barista head to the nearest tap and fill each Winchester a glass. “Thank you,” he said once she’d returned. He pulled out his badge and nudged Dean on the shoulder. Once he saw his brother retrieve his as well, he showed it to the barista. “If you wouldn’t mind, we have a few questions.”

“I thought it was strange to see two men like you in here at this hour,” she scoffed. She straightened herself out. “Skyler Grandhouse,” she introduced. “Ask me whatever you like. I can’t promise I’ll be much help.”

“Skyler, I’m sure you’ve heard of the disappearances in Athol. It’s… much more common here than the rest of Smith County.”

“Oh, believe me, I know, Agent. Do you think I wanted to work the bar here? You see some dodgy people at night in these parts.”

“Like what?”

“There’s this group—I swear I see them every time I’m on a nightshift. They’re loud, and drunk, and… it’s this group of frat boys, same ones every time. But there’s _always_ a girl with them, who’s different every time I see them.”

Sam and Dean looked at one another. That would explain the disappearances of young women that caught Mary’s friend’s attention.

“Do you know any of their names, Skyler?” Dean asked.

She shrugged. “Sure, in a way. I’ve gotten phone numbers and names from them after declining to join them, but none of them are real. I’ve looked.”

“Anything you got is a potential lead.”

“One of them says his name is Gale Gibson. But, believe me, Agent, I’ve checked every database out there. No record of him or the phone number he gives me. He’s a dead end; they all are,” she sighed. “I’m sure if you swing by this evening you’ll hear from them. It’s a Friday. They’ll be here,” she assured. “My friend, Holly Shearer, is working the bar tonight. I can let her know who you are if you’d like, and she can help you.”

“Sounds great, Skyler.”

Just then, Sam’s phone began to ring, with **Mom** written across the screen. He excused himself and went outside to accept the call. “Mom?”

“It’s Hunter.”

“Hunter. Right. What’s going on?”

“I don’t have your numbers, and Mary said you wouldn’t answer if you didn’t know who was calling. So I’m using her phone. I saw some guy on the road in Athol get out of his truck and talk to a woman. She looks suspiciously like the latest missing person. So I took both license plate numbers for you.”

“Right, thank you, Hunter. Give me a second to get something to write with.”

“Sure thing.”

Sam went back inside to his seat at the bar, pulling his napkin to a more suitable location for writing. “Excuse me, Skyler. Could you grab me a pen?”

“No problem,” she replied. She disappeared into the back for a second before procuring for him a red pen they used for waitressing.

“Alright, Hunter. Go for it.”

As Hunter recited the numbers, Sam wrote them quickly on his napkin, sliding Skyler her pen once he finished. “Thank you,” he said as a blanket statement to both of them. Skyler left to tend to another customer, and Sam showed Dean the license plate numbers once Hunter had hung up. “He came through.”

“What did I tell you, Sammy? Simple vampire case,” Dean said, finishing his drink. He left some cash on the bar for Skyler, and they were on their ways.

When they got back to the Impala, Sam called Mary’s number back to get a hold of Hunter again. “Hey,” he said when the line was picked up. “Hunter. You’ve got better connection than we do; could you track down those plates for us?”

“Done,” Hunter said. “Take the road out of town that gets you to Lebanon. A short ways down, there’s a path—a smaller, dirt road. Take that the entire way. There’s a house there. That’s where I tracked the plates to. Both of them.”

“That’s our nest,” Dean concluded, revving the engine on the Impala before putting it in reverse and heading out.

They took Hunter’s directions and found themselves at a house, just like the prophet had promised. Dean parked the car out front, and the brothers got out and headed to the trunk to get their vampire-hunting equipment out. They loaded up their jackets with dead-man’s blood and retrieved their machetes, and they were ready to take on the nest.

As it was daytime, the vampires were far less active than usual. This was an old trick John had taught them about nests. Vampires were, relatively, nocturnal. If a hunter could catch the nest during the day, he had a much better chance. Generally, it rang true.

The inside of the house was kept dark through blackout curtains covering the windows. To get inside, Sam had quickly, and quietly, picked the lock on the front door. There were no vampires in the immediate entrance, so, now that the brothers were in, it was a game of hide-and-seek. As they had seen the car belonging to Gretchen Van Fossen, the last girl to vanish, outside the house, they tacked finding her onto their list.

Dean gestured to Sam, directing him to go one way, and then to himself, nodding towards the opposite direction. Sam nodded and tightened his grip on his blade, heading off in the direction Dean had instructed.

He ended up in a hallway with doors on either side. He sighed, bracing himself before opening the first door on his right. Empty. He tried the one to his left. Empty. He continued trying all the doors down the hall. Completely empty.

Put-off, he followed where Dean had gone. They met up after Dean had finished investigating his hallway. Dean shrugged. “Nothing,” he said in a hushed voice.

“Yeah. Same. What the hell, Dean?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Gretchen’s car is here. The _other_ car is here. If the vampires aren’t, then where the hell could they be?”

There was a noise from below them, and Sam sighed. “Of course they’d be in the basement,” he scoffed.

“Vampires. Clichés, the lot of them.”

Together, they headed to the staircase, walking cautiously to avoid being too loud. Immediately upon entering the basement, they found Gretchen Van Fossen lying motionless on the floor. Sam and Dean looked to one another for a second before Sam approached her and lightly put a hand to her neck. He exhaled deeply and nodded, looking up at Dean and mouthing, “There’s a pulse.”

“Take her and go,” Dean whispered. “I’ll handle things until you’re back.”

Sam nodded and picked Gretchen up gingerly, carrying her up the staircase.

“Alright, you sons of bitches,” Dean growled once he was alone. “Let’s do this.”

He was approached almost instantly by three of them. The one in the center, not taking time for introductions, took a swing that hit Dean straight in the temple, knocking him to the floor. The vampire put his foot on the machete blade and eyed his intruder, _now_ deciding it was his time to monologue. “And who might this be?” When Dean went to answer, the vampire stopped him. “No, no, don’t speak. We already know. We knew who you were the second that stupid Impala of yours drove into Athol, Dean Winchester. Allow me to introduce us before we tear out your jugular.” He gestured to the boy on his left. “Brandon,” he said. He motioned to the boy on his right. “Vince,” he said, his voice more stiff. And, finally, he extended his arms wide to show himself off. “And, of course, myself. Henry. Nice to meet you, Dean Winchester. You know, it’s an honor, really. I always figured some dumbass in a flannel would come here waving a machete around eventually. Never thought we’d make Sam and Dean Winchester’s hitlist though. I can’t believe we get to be the ones to take you two off the map. You know, usually we snack on females, but for this? This is definitely worth the exception.”

Dean grimaced at him. “Bite me,” he snarled, trying to pull the blade away.

“Gladly,” Henry cooed. He leaned down and opened his mouth wide, breathing heavily as his fangs descended.

When he was close enough, Dean reached into his jacket and pulled out a syringe of dead-man’s blood, burying it deep into Henry’s neck and dropping the vampire to the ground. Dean cleared his throat and stood up, looking between Brandon and Vince. “Who’s first?”

“Arrogant dick,” Vince said as he made to take Dean back down, but he was stopped in his tracks by Dean’s blade cleanly cutting through his neck. Before giving Brandon a chance to react, Dean had his head rolling too, followed swiftly by Henry.

“Pretty boys never do make good vampires,” Dean sighed, kicking Henry’s head out of his path and heading deeper into the nest.

Right about then, Sam returned from the car. It didn’t take the brothers too long as a team to clear out the other four vampires.

Before nightfall, as Dean promised, they were on their ways back to Lebanon after dropping Gretchen Van Fossen off anonymously at the nearest hospital. And before they knew it, they were in the bunker, met shortly by Farrah, Elizabeth, Castiel, and Jack.

“Sam, Dean, Mary, Hunter,” Farrah greeted. “May I present to you a successful endeavor,” she said with a garish gesture to the group of celestials. “Something’s finally gone our way,” she breathed, taking a seat at the table.

“About time,” Dean scoffed.


	18. Good Life Ain't Cheap

Affairs in Hell had been chaotic under Bela Talbot.

Hunter had gone dark after they’d assumed him dead in Lebanon, Kansas. And that had simply been the start of it. Heaven was gearing up to go to war on a biblical scale, and Hell was frankly unprepared for it. They’d suffered quite a crushing defeat at the hands of the Winchesters when Elizabeth and Rowena were freed in Lawrence. Alarms had been sounding nonstop since the angels had broken Michael out of the Cage. Not to mention the fact that, being so new as Bela was, it was occasionally hard to keep herself steadily demonic. She could feel herself in a way flickering on and off; it diminished her ability considerably.

It was becoming more and more obvious with time that, though she could strike a great deal and drive a hard bargain, she simply wasn’t meant to be at the head of the ship. So, as a result, the entirety of the demons, Bela included, had redirected focus away from the biblical turmoil and Lucifer’s child and instead aimed to find a replacement.

It was proving impossible.

They’d originally approached Asmodeus, but he’d vehemently, violently declined. He’d seen what had become of Dagon, Ramiel, and Azazel after they’d gotten anywhere on the Winchesters’ radar. He wasn’t inclined to do the same.

The present King of the Crossroads, Bela’s red-eyed companion Barthamus, wasn’t even up for consideration. He’d been tyrannical with the little power he had; they’d be damned (pun somewhat intended) if they gave him more.

Everyone who had a high rank in Hell was dead: Lilith. Samhain. Azazel. Dagon. Crowley. Ramiel. Alastair. Lucifer, as far as they knew. Bela was beginning to be the only option, aside from handing the baton to someone else equally unqualified with half the charisma.

That was until Raphael and his merry band had crashed through their interdimensional rift and returned Lucifer to his dimension.

It was incidental that they came across the devil. One of Bela’s underlings on the surface had happened to be in the area where the rift had torn and was witness to the entire show. Naturally, he brought it to the Queen immediately.

“Lucifer’s back in play?” Bela asked, playing with her hair.

“I saw him with my own two eyes,” the other demon said, flickering his eyes to turn black as he spoke.

“About bloody time,” Bela said, getting to her feet. “You wouldn’t happen to know where a Queen could find him?”

The demon nodded, returning his eyes to his vessel’s natural green. “Last I saw, he came through some type of portal in North Cove, Washington. Check somewhere around there. If he’s gone, we can track him.”

Bela gave the demon a small smile before teleporting herself to Washington. Usually on something like this she would have sent a subordinate. However, this, a rendezvous with the devil himself, was far too important.

She managed to travel all across North Cove and its vicinity at record speeds. Being a demon had its perks. She ended up finding the Prince of Darkness in a restaurant in Seattle, though he was accompanied by unfamiliar faces. Still, she wasn’t a coward. She straightened her posture and approached Lucifer and his group.

“Lucifer,” she greeted with a polite curtsy. “Bela Talbot, Queen of Hell. Nice to make your acquaintance at long last.”

“Queen of Hell?” Lucifer scoffed.

“At the moment,” she confirmed. There was space at their table, so she asked, “May I?” with a gesture towards it.

Lucifer looked around at Raphael and Hannah, arching an eyebrow. Raphael extended his hand as a sign of permission. Lucifer looked back up to Bela and nodded. “Sit,” he said coolly, watching her intently.

She held her small, well-mannered grin as she assumed the open seat next to Leigh Kennedy. “Who are your friends?”

“Raphael, Hannah, Leigh Rose,” Lucifer said curtly, gesturing to the respective person. “What are you here for, Queen Bee?”

“I’m here to make an offer, actually. I know you desired the throne of Hell, did you not? You and Crowley were always fighting over it. And I’m here to proposition it to you. No strings attached, I promise.” Her eyes flickered red. “I’m a crossroads demon by trade. I like to keep to my word, on principle.”

“What would your terms be?”

“All I ask is to run the crossroads,” she said coolly. “I’ve realized now that being Queen of Hell, though the title is glorious, simply isn’t where I ought to be. And I was already in control of the crossroads before, and things went smoothly. Crowley had perhaps a singular crossroads-related incident in all my reign. Far less than any other King before had dealt with. A demon named Barthamus has taken my place, and he’s just one of many relatively easy-to-solve problems in Hell at the moment. This deal of ours is the clear solution here. The crossroads need me, and the rest of Hell needs its devil.”

“Interesting.”

“Although, I should have you know there’s somewhat of a war on at the moment. With Heaven. Over your son.”

“Of course there is.”

“ _But_ I assume you can handle that. You are, after all, the devil himself. An archangel. God’s favorite son.”

“Flattery won’t get you anywhere.”

“I’ve made you a fine offer, Lucifer. You’d be a fool to pass it up after feuding over the crown with Crowley for so long.”

“I happen to think it’s a great idea,” Raphael interjected. “Think about it—I take Heaven, you take Hell. Together, we’re unstoppable.”

“There, see?” Bela said. “So the war isn’t even a concern at that point. I insist you take up the position, Lucifer.”

“I don’t see why not,” Lucifer replied.

Bela let her smile grow bigger. “Wonderful. I’ll get the word out immediately,” she assured. “The crossroads are mine to control?”

“That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

“What would you like done with the current King?”

“Whatever you wish, Bela. That’s your domain.”

She smirked. “I like your reign already,” she said before disappearing back to Hell to tell the demons of the change in power.

And, of course, to take Barthamus off the board.

“Well, that was easy,” Lucifer said, looking around at his party. “And to think I thought I’d need to fight that one out.”

“That, my friend, is a girl who knows her limits,” Hannah remarked.

“One down, one to go,” Raphael commented.

He, Lucifer, and Hannah had, unbeknownst to Bela, already planned for this to occur, though they didn’t imagine it would go so smoothly.

“What are the odds Heaven transfers power so easily?” Hannah asked, her tone half-joking as she looked between archangels.

“Doubtful,” Lucifer scoffed. “As counterintuitive as it is, Heaven is a lot harder to work with than Hell.”

“This is too much,” Leigh said, getting to her feet.

“Not now, Leigh.”

“Not—then _when_ , Lucifer? My entire _worldview_ has been rocked. _She’s_ an angel. _You two_ are archangels— _you’re_ Satan himself. A _demon_ just appeared out of nowhere to make you the King of Hell. Tell me when it’s too much, Lucifer.”

“Alright, alright. But we already went over this, Leigh. You can’t panic every time a new supernatural thing happens.”

“Did I mention that we’re currently in an entirely different dimension? I’ve earned panicked and confused.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“You’re the devil. You wouldn’t know. You’ve _always_ been dealing with this. Since literally the beginning of time.”

“Okay, _that_ is not true. Heaven and Hell, maybe. The interdimensional shit’s new territory for all of us.”

“Oh, well, in that case, it’s all okay.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“I’m being _sarcastic_ , Lucifer. That makes it infinitely worse.”

“Leigh, come on. Calm down.”

She took in a deep breath. She knew she didn’t need to be acting up like this anymore. This, whether or not she liked it or understood it, was simply her new reality. Better to adjust to it than blow her top every time there was a development. After a second to regain herself, she nodded. “Right, right, you’re right.”

“That’s my girl,” Lucifer praised.

“I still don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Raphael scoffed.

“Prophets never like it,” Lucifer added.

“All you have to do is deal with it,” Hannah said, finishing the archangels’ thoughts. “You’re in it now.”

“For how long?” Leigh asked.

“Oh, honey, you’re a prophet until your death.”

“Speaking of, we didn’t think this through very well,” Raphael said as he came to a sudden realization.

“What do you mean?”

“We didn’t think to bring any future prophets with us. What if she bites it?” he asked, gesturing to Leigh Rose.

“I am _right_ here,” the prophetess protested.

“It’s fine, Raphael. There’s a prophet on this side, too. We’ll just find them instead. Problem solved,” Lucifer said. The celestials had collectively decided to ignore Leigh Kennedy’s discomfort with the subject.

“And if _that_ prophet dies?” Raphael asked.

“Stop _worrying_ so much, Raphael,” Lucifer sighed. “If the back-up prophet dies, I have the list. I’m connected to this side, remember? I’ll know.”

“Right, of course,” Raphael said.

“I just got the throne of Hell,” Lucifer reminded. “Everything is absolutely under control. Now, shut up and stop your worrying. All of you.”

“What do we do instead?” Hannah asked, once again only being halfway serious.

Lucifer’s response was entirely legitimate. “ _I_ am going to scope out my beautiful kingdom. _You_ people… I don’t know. Do whatever. Heaven’s a lovely place this time of year. Raphael wants the crown, so… get a jump on that.”

With that, he left them to visit Hell. It was as he remembered it, though considerably more livable now that Crowley was no longer in the picture.

He was greeted upon arrival by Bela. “Lucifer,” she breathed. “I didn’t expect you’d be down so soon.”

“I assume it’s not a problem.”

“No, of course not. It’s the opposite, really.”

“Good to hear.”

She gestured to the throne. “Care to?”

“Hell yes I do,” he replied, taking her up on the notion and claiming his spot on the throne. “God, I missed this.”


	19. The Soul Can Be Bludgeoned, Tortured—but Never Broken

Michael stood before Rowena and Anael, though doing so was a team effort. He was hardly in good shape to do so on his own, so in order to make it happen he had an angel on each side to hold him up on his feet.

Anael was at a loss for words. She knew the word had been that life in the Cage hadn’t treated God’s first son very well, but she could not have imagined the damages. She cleared her throat to break the silence.

“He’ll be _fine_ ,” Rowena insisted. “Just a little witchcraft to get the healing going, and Michael will be in fighting condition in no time.”

“And you know this for certain? You aren’t just saying what you think I want to hear?” Anael asked, her arms crossed.

“No, of _course_ not,” Rowena affirmed. “It might take some time, but magic can heal just about anything. I’m sure I can find a spell for… this. If I can find a way to survive being burned alive and ascending to Heaven, I can find a way to fix your archangel.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m right.”

Anael extended her hands towards Michael. “Then he’s all yours. However long it takes. But, Rowena, efficiency is… strongly advised.”

“You angels don’t do patience very well,” Rowena sighed. “But I know, I know. I’ll work as quickly as I can, but I won’t make any promises.”

“You’ve already made promises, Rowena. You’ve promised that there’s something you can do for him.”

“I won’t make you any promises I don’t think I can keep,” Rowena clarified. “Can I cure him? Sure. Can I do it quickly? Could go either way.”

Anael sighed, but she didn’t retort. Instead, she turned to the angels flanking Michael. “Jude. Diana,” she acknowledged. There was a chair behind them that she gestured to. “Set him down. You can go.”

Jude and Diana dragged Michael back to the chair and set him down gently, backing away slowly to be sure he’d stay.

When he managed to sit upright on his own, Rowena nudged Anael on the shoulder. “There, see? He’s halfway there already. If Michael can sit up on his own, I’ll have him standing eventually.” Knowing how ironic it would be, she added, “Just have a little faith, Anael.” She inclined her chin and looked back to Michael.

Anael pursed her lips, still unconvinced. “You’re the expert,” she conceded anyway, though she was eyeing Michael with serious doubts.

“You’re right. I am. Now, quit your worrying.”

“Good luck, Rowena,” she said.

At that, Anael, Diana, and Jude all left together, leaving Rowena alone with her new project. She sighed and looked him over from afar. He was physically sitting straight, though his eyes were wandering and blank.

“Michael,” she greeted, though she didn’t expect a response. “My name is Rowena MacLeod. How are you today?” She paused. “Can’t argue with that. If my son were here, I’d be feeling the same way,” she scoffed. She now approached him, saying, “My son, Fergus, used to be the King of Hell. Word is he’s dead now. And here I thought I’d be the one to take him out. Funny how things go, isn’t it? When I was a young little witch back in Scotland, I _never_ would have expected to end up _here_. Ah, but don’t fret, my boy; you’re in good hands.

“I looked after the devil for a short time. You know, Satan? Your little brother Lucifer? Of course, I turned around and stabbed the bastard in the back, but that won’t happen here. I _like_ you. I think. Hey, between you and me, your brother? Lucifer? He’s insufferable. I understand why he wasn’t the most popular girl in school back in the day. But your Father took a liking to him, I hear. Interesting. His tastes and mine are… strikingly different. The way I see it, you’re Lucifer’s opponent, and an enemy of Lucifer’s is a friend of mine.

“Why am I telling you this? So you know where these hands have been, of course. Did you know I also rehabilitated your Aunt Amara a few years back? Simpler times, really. And now, here I am—healing the archangel Michael.

“Now, I’m not sure precisely what your little brother’s prison’s been doing to you over the years, but whatever it is, I can do _something_ for it. I healed Amara after all of Heaven smote her at once. _Lucifer_ was in _terrible_ shape. His vessel would have blown to pieces if I hadn’t made the thing strong enough to contain him.

“I’ll be damned if I can’t fix a little… mental break. That’s all this is, right, Michael? You’re off your rocker?

“You know, I also used my magic on Dean Winchester. And Sam Winchester. And their pet angel, Castiel. I get the feeling you know who they are. I won’t go into detail about Sam and the angel—it might frighten you away. If you could walk, of course. But you’re stuck with me. Still, I’m not here to scare you; I’m here to _help_ you. Change of pace, I guess. Anyway, back to the Winchesters. Dean, Dean, Dean. I took the Mark of Cain right off his arm; did you know that? How else did you think Aunt Amara got out, anyway? And I reversed a powerful memory spell for him.

“I’m stroking my ego, I know. But, bear with me, Michael. I’m trying to see when in my past I’ve done anything like this for someone else’s sake. It’s been awhile, I’ll admit. But you’re in good hands, I insist.

“Is that it? I’ve lost track. I’d like to believe it’s not. I know I can be… selfish. Manipulative. But I’d like to believe there’s more.

“Oskar! How could I forget my dear, sweet Oskar? I gave that boy the gift of immortality _centuries_ ago.

“He’s dead now, of course. We won’t talk about what happened. But it was for Dean Winchester. Do people have a habit of creating new problems while trying to solve the Winchesters’? Because that’s what it feels like.

“Dear God, I’ve talked awhile. But it’s all good. There’s no activity up there, is there? Anything I say now goes in one ear and right out the other. You won’t remember a damned thing—not in that state, at least.

“Alright. Therapy’s over. Let’s see what we can do about fixing that head of yours, shall we, Michael?”

The thing Rowena enjoyed most about performing her craft in Heaven was the nearly endless supply of ingredients at her fingertips. She didn’t need to be bothered to fetch the unusual on her own; the angels had already done it for her.

She ran through the first few spells that came to her mind. None of them seemed to do the trick. Still, she kept going. She’d made a promise—to Heaven, to Anael, to Michael, and, damn it, to herself as well. She was going to see this through.

As Rowena was busy casting spell after spell, Anael was met at the entrance to Heaven by, naturally, Raphael and Hannah, ready to take the place over.

“Who might you be?” she asked upon their arrival. Her eyes were narrow as she looked them over distrustfully.

“This is Raphael—the archangel,” Hannah said. “I’m… not important. Just as long as you know I’m with him.”

“I find that hard to believe. Raphael was killed years ago.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, right. Anael,” she introduced, inclining her chin. “You wouldn’t happen to be connected to Farrah, would you? The angel who broke into our reality and weaseled her way into our ranks before dropping off the radar?”

“She is ours,” Hannah confirmed. “But our Heaven—Raphael’s Heaven—is not affiliated with her any longer.”

“Interesting,” Anael noted. “Because I find it odd how the minute she’s back in our circle we’re met by an _arch_ angel from her side of the gate. And, as it seems, an archangel with some sway in his homeland.”

“This is not about Farrah.”

“Oh, contraire, mon ami! It seems everything’s got Farrah’s filthy little fingerprints all over it these days. I’ll have to suggest you be on your ways,” Anael said. “Farrah’s said in the past not to trust anyone she knows from the ass-backwards disaster you call a dimension.”

“And you trust _her_?”

“More than I trust _you_.”

“Who are you to speak to us like that?” Raphael scoffed.

“This place?” Anael said, gesturing grandiosely around her at Heaven. “It’s all at my will. And we’ve got our fair share of archangels. And, frankly, ours is better. Almost.”

“Almost?” Hannah asked.

“Michael is a work in progress. A work that you have no part of. It was wonderful meeting you. And when she stops serving her purpose, you two can kindly head back home and take Farrah with you on the way.”

“We don’t intend to head home any time soon, Anael,” Raphael purred. He tensed his muscles and pursed his lips.

“I’m sure you don’t. But, frankly, we don’t trust you, we don’t _like_ you, and we don’t need you around.”

“Cold.”

“Honest.”

“Perhaps you’d be more amicable knowing Hell has gotten its very own archangel back. You remember Lucifer, don’t you, little girl?”

“What?” Anael breathed. She shook her head to regain her composure. “I mean—of course, I remember Lucifer.”

“Know that I’m on his good side.”

“No one’s ever on Lucifer’s ‘good side,’” Anael scoffed. “You’ve been deceived, I’m afraid. He used you to reclaim his throne. He doesn’t give a damn about you, about your pet—” She motioned to Hannah. “Or about your problems.”

“Oh? Then why do you look so frightened, Anael?”

“We _all_ should be frightened. But I’m afraid there’s nothing Heaven can do for you. For either of you. We’re tentative holding onto Farrah as it is. We don’t need to risk bringing in any new foreigners from her side of the rift.”

“If Farrah and Lucifer are your main concerns, then you’d be even more of a fool to not take me up.”

“I have no regrets seeing you go, Raphael.”

Raphael smirked. “Not yet, you don’t.”

“Even as I take my dying breath I won’t. At Lucifer’s hand, at Farrah’s hand—it doesn’t matter. I won’t regret shutting you down.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“It’s a promise. I advise you be on your ways.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Come on, Raphael. This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she sighed, standing in front of Raphael, between him and Anael.

Raphael cleared his throat, and they were gone.

Anael snarled at the vacancy they left. Hurriedly and irritably, she headed back to check in on Rowena and Michael.

“Anael,” Rowena said. “I understand the progress is slim, _but_ I’ve got him at _least_ able to function. On a purely physical level.”

She gestured upwards, and Michael, on his own, got to his feet. He walked forward and extended a hand to Anael. She took his in hers and shook it lightly. When they’d let go, he departed and resumed his position in the chair.

“See? It’s a start. Now, what he can do is limited. I doubt he’d be much good in the heat of battle. But he’s improving.”

“Good on you,” Anael responded. “Really. Hopefully the progress continues to be swift. It appears we might have an imminent civil war.”

“Excuse me?”

Just then, Anael got a message from Joseph asking her to meet her in the prison. Immediately. “No, Rowena. Excuse _me_ ,” she said. She dashed out of the room and down to the prison, finding Joseph standing at its entrance. “What do you need?”

“I think you better take a look inside, Anael,” Joseph replied, his voice tense. “It appears something’s… gone wrong.”

Anael narrowed her eyes, but she did as Joseph suggested. The prison, to her horror, was entirely empty. “When did this happen, Joseph?” she asked him, as he had followed behind her.

He shrugged. “We don’t know,” he admitted.

She continued to look through the prison as if its vacancy would change and she’d stumble upon someone. “How did this happen, Joseph?”

“I assume it’s something to do with Johal and Tyriel. And Jesse. And Kenan. All of them were found dead.”

“When was this? How wasn’t I aware?”

“The same night Michael was brought up.”

Anael sighed. “The night Farrah returned.”

“What do you suggest we do, Anael?”

“I don’t _know_ , Joseph,” she replied heatedly. “We’ll figure something out. Until then, I want every available angel on guard.”

“That can happen.”

“And I want Farrah brought back here immediately.”

“That can happen.”

“And bring me Castiel too. This has his scent all over it.”

“That can happen.”

“ _And_ I want the names and graces of any angel working against us,” she said, growing progressively angrier.

“That can happen.”

“Then get to work, Joseph. Heaven can’t wait.”


	20. Like Being Chained to a Comet

“Now that we’re all here and not in captivity, can we take a second to discuss something? Celestial to celestial?” Farrah said, addressing Castiel, Jack, and Elizabeth. The four were gathered around a table.

“You mean the alarms,” Castiel intuited.

“What else?”

“Sorry, but _no one_ knows what they mean,” Elizabeth sighed. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“Well, whatever it is, it can’t be good, right? I doubt every celestial being alive would be getting warnings if it were,” Farrah scoffed.

“Right. Which makes it worse.”

“Now it’s some likely negative event that we can’t respond to,” Castiel said. “You’d think God would have told us what these alerts mean. They’re hardly helpful if we don’t know what they’re telling us.”

“Remember when the Darkness was set free, Castiel? No one knew what _those_ alarms meant either,” Elizabeth recalled. “The emergency system in Heaven is severely lacking, if I do say so myself. Highly inconvenient.”

“I’m not even going to begin to unpack that,” Farrah said, shaking her head. “How do you suppose we figure this out?”

“I guess maybe someone in Heaven’s on the case.”

“That’s hardly helpful if none of us are in Heaven.”

“You’re at least on good terms with Heaven.”

“That’s debatable,” Farrah scoffed.

Elizabeth arched an eyebrow. “Anael would have killed you when you were buying Castiel some time.”

“Oh, I’m on _alright_ terms with Heaven. They’ve been better. Right now, it’s a bit shaky. I disappeared for a little while.”

“I know.”

“And Anael is a little pissed about it.”

“Of course she is.”

“It doesn’t help that this chaos is happening _right_ when I decide to return. You’re missing—”

“Heaven doesn’t care where I am. They know what happened with the demons.” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Well, that being aside the point, it’s still an issue I’m sure Anael would love to pin on me. _But_ that’s not all, anyway. Jack’s gone missing too—they’re going to figure that out eventually. And now there’s these mysterious alarms no one understands sounding off all over the place. All of this conveniently timed right around my surprise reappearance in Heaven. So it’s safe to say Anael is skeptical.”

“That’s inconvenient.”

“What isn’t inconvenient these days?”

“Well, that’s irrelevant anyway. I’m willing to bet I’m currently on worse terms than you are,” Elizabeth said, crossing her arms.

“That may or may not be true. Anyone, other than Castiel, Jack, and I, obviously, who knew you were in Heaven is dead.”

“Presumably,” Elizabeth admitted. “Regardless, Castiel’s definitely on bad terms.”

“I can confirm that,” Castiel interjected.

“C, _anyone_ can confirm that,” Farrah sighed. “No one was suggesting we send _him_ up there to figure this out.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “My point is, if anyone’s on decent enough terms with Anael’s people to get something done about th—did you feel that one?”

“Elizabeth, we’re all celestials. Of course we felt it.”

The angels were chattering loudly on angel radio, and Jack reacted by violently clutching his temples.

“Do you want me to teach you how to shut it off?” Castiel asked, reaching out a hand and putting it to Jack’s shoulder.

Jack shook his head. “No, thank you. It hurts, but I like to hear it. I like knowing what the angels are talking about.”

“Your funeral, kid,” Farrah responded.

“Farrah, you _have_ to do it,” Elizabeth said, returning the conversation to the alarms sounding in Heaven.

“Do _what_?” Farrah exclaimed. “Just because they let me _in_ up there doesn’t mean I can suddenly fix these alarms.”

Elizabeth pursed her lips. “You can at least figure out what they’re trying to do to shut them off,” she snarled.

“Last time I talked to Anael, she was pretty clear that none of the angels up there had any better idea what’s going on.”

“ _Someone’s_ got to figure it out eventually.”

“And when they do, and the alarms shut off, _then_ I’ll go up and get some intel. Until then, I’d like to avoid Heaven. Like I told you, Anael’s mad at me.”

“You’re our only solid link to Heaven, Farrah. I’m not sure you get to avoid them under the circumstances,” Castiel said dryly.

“Not indefinitely,” Farrah corrected. “But for a short while, I think we can all— _including_ Anael—live without sending me up there.”

“If you say so.”

They were abruptly interrupted by Hunter, striding briskly into the room. His eyebrows were furrowed, and he was evidently distressed.

“Hunter?” said Castiel, narrowing his eyes.

“What the hell happened to you?” Farrah asked. She pulled out the chair beside her to allow him to take a seat.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said gruffly, accepting the chair. He looked around at the company. “I don’t _know_ what happened.”

“You don’t know what _caused_ it,” Farrah clarified. “Look, just start from the beginning, and we’ll help you sort it out.”

He nodded, steadying his breath. “I’ve been getting these ridiculous headaches,” he explained. “And my whole body’s shaking—not all the time, though. Like… little pulses every now and then. Never felt anything like it.”

Farrah sighed, putting her head in her hand. “When did this start, Hunter?” she asked, forming an idea.

“About the same day you brought the kid back from Heaven,” he replied.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“You don’t think this has anything to do with _him_ , do you?” Elizabeth asked, her voice sounding more concerned than before.

“Probably,” Farrah responded. She turned specifically to Hunter. “An alarm’s been sounding in Heaven. Started that same day.”

“Oh?” Hunter said, inclining his head. “What kind of an alarm?”

“That’s the million-dollar question.”

“I don’t get it.”

“ _Nobody_ gets it. No one’s ever heard this alarm before. It’s driving the celestials absolutely mental.”

“What does that got to do with me, ma’am?”

“No idea. But it’s… a development.”

“How so?”

“When the alarms went off for the Darkness, it woke a prophet,” Elizabeth said, trying to get on Farrah’s page. “But I don’t think anything… unusual happened.”

“As far as I know, Donatello’s awakening was the same as anyone else’s,” Castiel confirmed. “He never brought up the alarms, at least.”

“You don’t think this alarm’s got to do with the prophetic chain, do you?” Elizabeth asked, rewording essentially the same question from before but hoping to receive a different answer to it nonetheless.

Farrah shrugged. “Hell if I know. But I wouldn’t be too shocked if it did, you know? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a prophet hearing Heaven’s emergency alerts,” she said. She looked between Castiel and Elizabeth. “Unless you have.”

“That’s never happened.”

“So it’s got to be prophets,” Farrah deduced.

“But what _about_ prophets?” Elizabeth asked.

“One thing at a time, Elizabeth. We’re getting there. It’s more than we had twenty minutes ago, isn’t it?”

Elizabeth sighed. “You’re right, you’re right.”

“Maybe someone shut the prophet system down,” Castiel suggested. “That’s happened in the past.”

“He’s right—that is possible. Metatron did it.”

“Your Heaven is starting to sound more like a disaster than my Apocalyptic dystopia,” Farrah scoffed. “What the hell goes on around here?”

“It’s pretty much just bouncing consistently from one world-ending catastrophe to the next,” Elizabeth said nonchalantly.

Hunter’s eyes were wide. “For how long?”

“A good while.”

Farrah rolled her eyes. “Regardless, how could we tell for sure?”

Castiel shrugged. “I’m not—I feel like this isn’t right, though.”

“What do you mean? It was _your_ idea.”

“Yeah, but now that I think about it, I don’t think it’s right. I don’t remember any alarms going off after that.”

“Neither do I,” Elizabeth sighed, sinking into her chair.

“Damn,” Farrah responded bleakly.

“The only other disturbance like that I could think of that would involve prophets would be if two were active simultaneously.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, I don’t know _how_ it’d happen, but I know that if it _did_ happen it’d create some chaos. And here we have chaos.”

Farrah looked to the ceiling, racking her brain. She stood up suddenly, coming to a realization. “Elizabeth, you bloody genius,” she exclaimed.

“What have I done?”

“Here I am wondering how another—what if someone’s opened the rift back up? A prophet, specifically.”

Castiel too rose to his feet. “And if they cross over here…”

“There’s two prophets…”

“At the same time.”

Elizabeth was now standing as well. “You think that can happen?”

“ _I’m_ over here. Assuming they figure out a way to get the door open, sure, of course it can happen,” Farrah replied.

“That would mean there’s a way to get over there without using Jack,” Castiel added, crossing his arms.

“I’ve heard stranger.”

“Sure. But it complicates things.”

“Castiel, that’s really what’s bothering you about this?”

“Well, I mean—”

“No, no. I’m going to stop you right there. If someone’s figured out how to get over here without that boy’s power, I have more concerns than ‘oh, I wonder what strange new way they devised to do it.’ I’m not entertaining that.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Who would _want_ to come over here?” Elizabeth asked.

Farrah shrugged. “Your devil’s been trapped there awhile.”

“No, not him. He’s dead,” Castiel reminded.

“Shit, he is, isn’t he?” Farrah sighed. “Then I don’t know.”

“We don’t even know for sure that’s what happened.”

“When you have a better theory, I’d be more than happy to hear it, Castiel.”

“I’m just saying we don’t need to go making a big deal out of this when for all we know it’s incorrect.”

“I’d like to err on the side of caution.”

“And that means going wild with speculation?”

“In this case? Yes, it definitely does.”

“Alright.”

“If we’re right, and someone, specifically a prophet, is over here from my domain—where does that even put us? I mean, really, what—exactly—are we even supposed to do with that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m not sure I _want_ to be sure,” added Elizabeth.

“Do we tell Heaven?” Farrah asked.

“ _No_ ,” Castiel and Elizabeth said simultaneously.

“Lord. Tell me how you really feel.”

“I think we need to wait it out until we have more information,” Castiel rationalized.

“I just think that it’s an advantage to have information that Heaven doesn’t. Let them use their resources trying to deal with this. We’ll work on… whatever it is we need to work on. What’s our endgame again?” Elizabeth added.

“Frankly, no idea anymore. I think at this point we’re just trying to keep Jack and Hunter out of Heaven and/or Hell.”

“If we put all this effort into keeping the prophet away from them and they end up getting their hands on a second prophet anyway, I’m starting a riot,” Farrah scoffed.

Nearly in sync, the angels all took their seats again. Hunter and Jack had never stood to begin with.

“Where does this leave us?” Elizabeth asked, looking around the table.

“Elizabeth, the day we have the answer to that question is the day we all stop living,” Farrah breathed.


	21. What If the Bus Wants to Go Over the Cliff?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day early because I'll be out of town. The next one will be a day late for the same reason.

The celestials (and Hunter) had decided that, in lieu of telling Heaven their theory, they’d tell the Winchesters.

As such, Castiel and Elizabeth had gone to their rooms and returned to the table with all three Winchesters trailing behind them, thoroughly confused.

“What’s going on?” Mary asked, standing next to Elizabeth.

“Sit,” Farrah said, gesturing around the table. “We want to have a chat. Nothing _bad_ ,” she added, noting their expressions.

Hunter cleared his throat.

Farrah sighed, “Okay, nothing _catastrophic_.”

“Better,” Hunter said with a short nod.

“What’s going on?” Sam said after everyone was seated, echoing his mother’s unanswered question from earlier and directing it specifically at Farrah.

“There are alarms going off in Heaven. Unfamiliar alarms. Now, the four of us”—she gestured to the four celestials—“are inclined to think that shouldn’t be happening. And we were _trying_ to come up with any possibilities—”

“When Hunter told us he was getting the alarms too,” Elizabeth interjected. “Which also shouldn’t be happening.”

“Right. Those alarms are strictly meant for celestial beings. Prophets don’t experience them. Ever.”

“ _So_ , we began to entertain the idea that whatever this alarm meant involved the prophetic chain somehow.”

“At first we thought maybe someone shut it o—”

“Shut it off? Like Metatron did?” Dean interrupted.

“How is it that I can _never_ finish a thought around here?” Farrah scoffed. She rolled her eyes. “Yes. Like… Metatron… apparently did.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Let us tell the story, Dean.”

“It’s a long story.”

“And you’re making it longer.”

“ _Anyway_ , we realized that couldn’t be it because there wasn’t any type of alarm going off when he did that,” Castiel said, putting the conversation back on track.

“Right. I guess,” Farrah breathed. “So whatever it was had to do with prophets, and it _wasn’t_ the whole chain being turned off. So now we’re thinking there’s a second prophet active. If you know anything about the prophetic line, you know—”

“One prophet at a time,” Sam finished.

“You’re as bad as your brother.”

“How would that happen?” Mary asked, narrowing her eyes. “I would think that system was engineered by God.”

“It was.”

“So was the multi-verse,” Elizabeth reminded.

“So you people think a prophet’s broken into our dimension from Farrah’s?” Sam intuited, adding up the story.

“That can’t happen. We needed Jack to open the rift in the first place,” Dean reminded, crossing his arms.

“Or maybe you just needed the right spellwork,” Farrah suggested. “Look, we’re not sure, alright? But _something’s_ happening.”

“If there are two active prophets at the same time, that’s definitely enough shock to the system to create problems,” Elizabeth confirmed.

“So what do we do about it?” Dean asked.

“Two options: we kill one of the prophets, or we send the intruder back home,” Farrah explained curtly.

Just then, a door opened behind them, bringing everyone to their feet, Castiel and Farrah standing defensively in front of the group.

“You’ve got a prophet right here,” said a man’s voice. “Why not kill him now? See what it does about our little issue?”

“Who the hell—” Dean began.

“Joseph?” asked Castiel, Elizabeth, and Farrah in unison.

“My money’s on Joseph,” Sam teased, whispering in his brother’s ear.

Dean shoved Sam away with a scoff. “Bite me, Sam.”

Joseph descended the stairs and came into view, flanked by three other angels. “It’s been a little while,” he said, greeting all three.

“What do you want?” Farrah sighed. “Or, I guess, it’s what _Anael_ wants. You don’t have much of an original thought.”

“Simple. She wants you, the Nephilim, and Castiel returned upstairs. Promptly. And, while we’re here, we might as well bring up darling ‘Lizabeth. Is this where you’ve been all this time? Playing house with the Winchesters?”

“ _Heaven_ sure gave a damn,” Elizabeth scoffed. “I was captured, Joseph. On _Anael’s_ ridiculous mission.”

“Spare me the details, Elizabeth,” Joseph said, faking a yawn.

Sam and Dean pushed in front of Farrah and Castiel, standing tall and stiff as if to frighten the angels before them. “What does she want with them?” Sam asked. His eyes were dark as he stared daggers into Joseph.

“Hardly concerns you,” Joseph hissed. “You can try and stop me. I didn’t actually _come_ here to kill you and your brother, surprising as that may be, but, frankly, if I do, it would probably do us all a favor. Do you _know_ what a pain you two have been over the years?”

“We’ve got an idea,” Dean growled.

“I’m sure Castiel can attest to your ability to corrupt,” Joseph taunted, taking a step forward. “The great warrior Castiel. Leader of Heaven’s armies. What have you been reduced to, my boy? A _criminal_? The mighty, how they fall.”

“Are you here to take your hostages, or are you here to make half-ass attempts at insults? We don’t have all day.”

“You’re right. I got distracted. Pardon me.”

He looked to the angel on his right, who nodded, and took out an angel blade from her jacket. Before there could be reaction, she had thrown it straight by the Winchesters, where Hunter stood at the left side of the group, landing it directly through his ribcage and dropping the prophet to the floor immediately.

The alarms stopped sounding. “Looks like you were right,” Joseph said to Farrah with a grin of faux affection.

The angels’ brash violence launched everyone into battle.

The Winchesters’ and company, having significantly more manpower, held the upper hand for a time until Farrah took an angel blade to the abdomen. She wasn’t killed; Anael wanted her alive. But it severely weakened her. By the end of the fight, no one remained in the bunker but Jack, Mary, Sam, Dean, and Elizabeth. And Joseph’s corpse on the ground before them, where he’d fallen after Castiel had run him through.

“That went… worse than it probably should have,” Elizabeth remarked, looking around at the aftermath.

“You think?” Dean scoffed.

Up in Heaven, their own violent break-in had occurred. Raphael, deciding to simply take the crown instead of wait for it, had gone up with Leigh Kennedy and Hannah.

He hadn’t told Leigh Kennedy it would kill her to cross the threshold. He had intended to do so and to end the line of prophets. He’d be damned if someone figured out a way to send him back from whence he came.

He was met in the office by Anael, naturally. She was stiff and defensive, shooting to her feet the second he appeared.

“I told you we don’t want you here,” she snarled.

“And I told you that wasn’t good enough,” Raphael sighed.

“Did you turn that alarm off?”

“Honestly? No. But I’m grateful to whomever did it.”

“Then I’m going to have to tell you again, I suppose. Leave, Raphael. This Heaven isn’t yours to enter.”

“Right. Because it’s _yours_.”

“Until Michael’s fully operative.”

“That’s actually what I’ve come here to fix, Anael.”

“Is it?”

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to a chair in front of Anael’s desk and feigning diplomacy to lower her suspicions.

Anael narrowed her eyes. “If she leaves,” she said, nodding towards Hannah. “We can’t have a civil conversation if you’re armed.”

“Hannah is unarmed.”

“Then her presence is useless regardless. If she leaves, I’ll entertain your… proposition. If not, I respectfully decline.”

“You heard the girl,” Raphael said to Hannah.

Once Hannah disappeared, Raphael and Anael simultaneously took seats, though Anael was still tense where Raphael was collected.

“What do you want, Raphael?” asked Anael, leaning forward and propping her elbows on top of her desk.

“You know what I want, Anael.”

“And you know what my answer is.”

“Right. Michael.”

“Right,” Anael confirmed. “Michael,” she echoed, her voice lower than Raphael’s had been.

“I can assure you, from the sound of it, I’m far better suited than he is.”

“Michael’s unfavorable condition is temporary, Raphael. Rowena MacLeod is rehabilitating him as we speak.”

“And that’s effort she wouldn’t need to waste on me.”

“Unfortunately for you, Farrah got here first and hasn’t made the greatest first impression. I can’t in good conscience trust any of you.”

“That’s probably wise,” Raphael conceded. In the blink of an eye, he’d pulled out his blade, flown behind Anael, and driven it through her neck, watching satisfactorily as her vessel burned out in a brilliant blue-white light. Immediately after, he made sure to shut down the prophetic line of succession on this end of the portal. Now he was beginning to make decent headway.

However, he couldn’t fathom the incredible progress Rowena and Michael had been making since she started with him. By the time Anael was dead, Michael was nearly back to mint-condition and wholly desired to return to the throne.


	22. Chaos, and Violence, and Random, Unpredictable Evil

The angels that had come to Kansas with Joseph were met with a surprise when they returned home to a deceased Anael, a newly revived Michael, and an opponent from another plane of reality. A lot could change in a short time in Heaven.

They stood, with Castiel and Farrah, before Raphael, who towered over Anael’s body with Hannah at his side.

“Well, would you look at this,” he purred, looking Farrah over. “Our runaway dissident. And the spitting image of an old friend.”

“Raphael,” Farrah snarled. “What are you doing here?”

Raphael smirked, stepping out from behind the desk and dismissing the angels that had brought Castiel and Farrah with a snap of his finger, exploding them on the spot. “It’s a funny story, really,” he said coolly.

“I’m sure it is.”

“The devil and I—”

“Lucifer?” Castiel asked, furrowing his brows and inclining his chin. “Lucifer’s dead. My alternate had him killed.”

“Ah, so you _are_ Castiel,” Raphael noted, now circling Castiel and Farrah. “Yes, my dear friend Castiel~—not you, of course—he told everyone _all_ about you. You’re the one that struck him down. And I have to thank you for it. That’s what set this whole journey into motion.

“As for the misconception, yes, you’re right—your double, so bought into his own press, that one, did truly believe Lucifer was laid to waste. However, the part you’re forgetting is that Castiel~, as I assume you should know given your relationship with him, wasn’t an archangel, so naturally he couldn’t do away with Lucifer on his own. Not with the archangel blade.”

“He needed to call in a favor—from you, since you were the only living archangel,” Farrah said, piecing together the story at her own pace.

“Clever girl.”

“So what? He asks you to put Lucifer down and you refuse? How did you get that by him?” she scoffed.

“I took Lucifer down to the prison, and we waited the child out. Your scheming wasn’t secret. We figured his reign would crash at some point. And in any case, he never was as clever as he liked to believe.”

“And then when he was gone—”

“The two of us rose to power. Together. With Hannah along for the ride, of course,” he said, motioning to her.

“Wonderful.”

“You know, counterintuitive as it sounds, Castiel~ _was_ my friend. So the idea that we should all be here—well, your deaths at my hand feels nothing short of deserved vengeance. Which, I suppose, he’s earned after my betrayal. May he rest well.”

“One would hope not.”

“Your tongue was not missed when you disappeared, Farrah. We had angels scouring the Earth for you for a little while, actually. We wanted to show you how we dealt with mutiny. But, as it turns out, you were _here_ the whole time. And working _with_ Heaven. That’s a change in pace none of us could have seen coming. Brava, my girl.”

“For curiosity’s sake, what’s happened to our Heaven? You had the throne _there_ , Raphael; why did you need to come here?”

“Lucifer insisted we come to get his son. And I liked the idea of ruling something that wasn’t an apocalyptic wasteland. Don’t worry about the Heaven back home, Farrah. For one, Bartholomew’s taken the helm, and I trust him to be alright. For another, you’ll be dead anyway; it’s really not of your concern.”

“You keep talking about killing us off, but I have yet to see you try,” she taunted. “Come on, Raphael. Grow a pair.”

Raphael opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted when the entire wall behind them came crashing down.

“My first day on the job, and already I’ve got to fight someone. Heaven’s really lost the plot since the Apocalypse,” Michael sighed. He dusted off his hands as he entered the fray, followed closely behind by Rowena, smirking proudly at her achievement.

There was a hard pause in energy; tensions were rising, and Farrah could have sworn she heard everyone’s heartrates increasing with her own.

“Michael,” Castiel breathed, taking a step away from his lost brother and Rowena. “It’s… been awhile.”

“It has, hasn’t it, Castiel? The last time we were together you… well, you attacked me. With Holy Fire.”

“Did I do that?” Castiel asked in a voice nearly two octaves above his normal, knowing precisely what Michael was referring to. With a sigh and a roll of the eyes, he added, his tone returned to its default, “If it means anything, Lucifer killed me off for it. I’ve atoned.”

“And yet, here you are.”

“It’s a long—”

“I don’t need to hear it, Castiel. You’re not who I’m here for.” He coughed slightly, but he brushed it off and continued to stare down Raphael.

“Honestly? You think _you_ can take me down? Michael, look at you. You can barely talk without wearing yourself out,” Raphael scoffed.

“He doesn’t need to be able to take you down,” Rowena insisted. “He needs to be able to take _her_ ,” she said, pointing to Hannah.

“Excuse me?” Hannah asked, now taking a few rushed, heated paces towards Rowena. “And what do you think that will do, ginger?”

“On its own? Not much. You’re not very… well, your presence in this story doesn’t seem to have much impact does it. But you make Raphael feel stronger. So as long as Michael can kill you off, I’m more than capable of taking on your boss.”

“Really? You think _you_ can destroy an _archangel?_ ” Raphael asked. “That’s absolute insanity if I’ve ever heard it.”

“If I can repair one, I can destroy one. Reverse the process. Magic is nothing if not easily manipulated.”

“Whatever you say,” he growled. “Let’s see who blinks first.”

In a split second, battle had broken out in Heaven. Eventually, what had started as a simple two-on-two had turned into a full-blown civil war as angels of all spades began to pick up a blade for both sides.

Down on Earth, Elizabeth and Jack were party to the wild communication on angel radio. Heaven was in utter chaos.

“There’s a war in Heaven. Right now,” Elizabeth said, informing the Winchesters. Her voice was unsteady.

“That—Cas and Farrah are up there,” Mary interjected. “We’ve got to do something,” she insisted.

“ _We’ve_ got to do something,” Elizabeth corrected, gesturing towards herself and Jack. “Hang tight. You can’t come anyway.”

“Elizabeth, don’t do anything stupid.”

“Stupid’s the only thing that gets anything done in Heaven, I’m afraid,” she countered. She now turned to face Jack directly. “Can you teleport?”

Jack nodded. “Yes.”

“We need to get to Heaven.”

“No problem, Elizabeth,” he said. He put a hand on her shoulder, and they were there in the blink of an eye, leaving the Winchesters, once again, alone to hope their angelic comrades made it out of Heaven alive.

They were in the hallway that lead to what had been Anael’s office, where the action was taking place. This was easy for them to figure out; due to the lack of flight, there were angels sprinting like mad around them.

“Guess we follow the crowd,” Elizabeth said with a shrug.

Sure enough, when they entered Anael’s former office, they were confronted by the entirety of Heaven’s tension coming to a head.

Raphael, Michael, and Rowena were all still standing. Hannah had been killed by Michael in the time it took Jack and Elizabeth to get there.

It didn’t take long for the archangels to realize there was a Nephilim in the room. “Ah, you must be Lucifer’s boy,” Raphael greeted calmly, though he was still fending off attackers with ease. “Your father’s been looking for you.”

“Elizabeth, get him _out_ of here,” Castiel and Farrah, also fighting off attackers though they had officially taken neither side, yelled in unison.

“I want to help, Castiel,” Jack insisted.

“Help by keeping yourself out of this,” Castiel insisted. “The last thing anyone needs is for either side to get its hands on you.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “You got me this far. Go back to Kansas. I’m sure the Winchesters would like to have you there anyway to give them updates. They can’t hear the radio, after all; for all they know, we’re all dead.”

Jack sighed, but he nodded and vanished anyway.

Elizabeth ran towards Castiel and Farrah, and all three were now fighting off angels, standing in a pod with their backs facing one another.

“Castiel, Elizabeth—this is your Heaven. Who would you prefer?” Farrah asked.

“Out of a handicapped Michael or a dick Raphael?” Castiel scoffed. “Easily Michael. He’d be easier to keep in line.”

“Castiel’s right,” Elizabeth agreed. “And I don’t think we’re doing much good standing here fighting as a third party anyway. Someone’s got to win, right?”

“Then I want you to get yourselves, Michael, and his little witch nurse as far away from me as physically possible,” Farrah replied.

“What? Farrah—what are you doing?”

“It’s been real, guys. If I need to go out, this is how I want it to be. Now, take them and get the hell out of here. Before I have time enough to change my mind.”

“What are you doing, Farrah?” Elizabeth repeated, her tone more stern this time. “Don’t be insane.”

“It’s not insane.”

“You sound like a martyr, and martyring yourself off is insanity on the nuclear level.”

“In that case, I suppose perhaps it is insane. But sometimes insane—even on the nuclear level, as you say—is the only option on the table. Now, would you just listen to me?”

She curled into herself and, though Castiel and Elizabeth couldn’t tell precisely what she was doing, they noticed her carving something into her own chest with her blade. Suddenly, remembering his past with Metatron and Gadreel, Castiel realized what exactly Farrah was up to. “That is _not_ happening,” he said, making to take her blade.

“Yes, Castiel. It is. Would you just let me do this? _Someone’s_ got to put an end to this, and Raphael is from my dimension. He and I are the only ones left from over there on this side. If we’re dead, the multi-verse is balanced again. Besides, I’m more of a liability anyway, or do you not recall Joseph’s lovely gift back at the bunker?” She stopped her carving for a second to show the wound she’d sustained. It had been long enough that it was most of the way healed, but wounds from angel blades were hardly quick to close up, and she could feel her strength bleeding away through it.

“Damn it, Farrah.”

“I had a good run, Castiel.”

“And it doesn’t have to end here.”

“I’m more than certain—with your track record—that I’ll see you on the other side eventually. Just—not too soon, alright? You lot have so much left to do in this world.”

“Trust me; I’ve been there. You won’t.”

“Then it’s a moot point. Regardless, it doesn’t dissuade me, Castiel.”

“Farrah, put the blade down.”

“I don’t see a Door Number Two here, Castiel.”

“There’s always a Door Number Two. We just need to _find_ it.”

“And how long do you expect that to take, hm? In case you’re unaware, all we’ve really got is the here and the now, Castiel.”

“There’s that poison—you remember? Back in American Falls?”

“I remember Idaho more vividly than I care to contemplate right now, yes.”

“You said it was one of Michael’s playthings. Farrah, you knew all _about_ that stuff. It’s _meant_ to take out celestials, right?”

“If I said you’re wrong, it’d be a lie.”

“So we use that.”

“No, Castiel, we don’t, because, even though it’s got a pretty simple remedy, the process to make the actual _poison_ is some painstaking magic we’re completely out of time for. Not to mention the fact that if we do the slightest thing wrong we’d have no way to know until we ignite the spark and the bomb doesn’t detonate. Besides, there’s ingredients that it calls for that we just don’t have the time to procure. If someone would have had this idea days ago, fine. It’s a bad move, Castiel. This—what I’m doing here? This works. It works now, and it works 100%.”

“Damn you.”

“If that’s how you want to part, then so be it, Castiel. But my decision here isn’t up for debate, and you know why that is? Because, for the love of Christ, all my life I’ve spent running in some way or another. From Michael. From Naomi. From Castiel~. From Hester. Hell, from Anael—even from the lot of you for a brief time. But, you know, recently there’s been more and more moments where I actually faced my dilemmas head on, like a proper warrior. Not in small thanks to you—and to those Winchester boys. Do thank them for me when the dust settles, would you? Like I said, I had a good run. And if this is what needs to do me in, then I can say with the utmost of sincerity that I’m going out on a high note. And, frankly, this seems like a fitting end, wouldn’t you agree? Please let me do this, Castiel. After everything you all have done for me—after everything you did to help my cause so long ago, when it wasn’t even your dimension on the line. You risked your lives for my side of the portal; let me give mine for yours. It’s the very least I can do, understand? The things we have accomplished together—you, me, Sam, Dean. Everyone. Unspeakable, to say the least. I’ve reached the apex, Castiel. It was never going to get any better than this. It was never going to end any other way. And I shouldn’t particularly invite it to.”

Castiel gave Farrah a nod and put his hand on her shoulder for a second, his silent good-bye. He looked up to Elizabeth, and all three angels gave one another wistful smiles before Elizabeth found Rowena and Michael and dragged Castiel away. Once they’d reached them, Elizabeth tapped Rowena on the shoulder. “That angel over there, Farrah—she’s about to put an end to all of this. But if we want to live, we need to get the hell out of here now.”

“What is she up to?” Rowena asked, holding off some angels with a simple spell that required none of her attention.

“She’s turning herself into a bomb. She’s going to kill everyone in her vicinity when it goes off,” Elizabeth explained.

Rowena nodded and grabbed Michael by the shoulder. “The battle’s about to be won, my boy. We needn’t be here to experience it.”

On the way out, they held off some angels and Elizabeth told Michael what Farrah was planning and why he needed to escape.

Once her allies had gone, Farrah took in a deep breath to brace herself and stood firmly in the center of the room, right before Raphael.

“What happened to your friends?” he asked with a fake pout.

“They’re safe,” Farrah replied.

“They’re cowards.”

“No, Raphael; they’re smart. They listened to me. And now this battle is done. This—this, Raphael, is simply justice. And if Castiel~ is suffering, I hope oblivion does you so very much worse,” she said proudly before running her angel blade through her chest.

Everything went white as the entirety of the room, and a few of the ones surrounding it, were blown away with everyone inside.


	23. You and Me—We’re All That’s Left

When Castiel and Elizabeth returned to Earth, they were, obviously, short an angel, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Winchesters.

Though they received a friendly welcome, it was cut short when Jack noted that Farrah hadn’t come with them.

Elizabeth tugged at her shirt collar while Castiel explained what had happened, finishing it with, “She saved us. All of us. And she told me to thank you. For… everything.”

They were interrupted by a knock at the door, which Elizabeth went and answered.

“Hello, dear,” Rowena greeted. Michael stood beside her. “Mind if we drop in a short second? Won’t be long.”

“Come on in,” Elizabeth said, though her voice was resigned.

“Winchesters,” Rowena greeted, following Elizabeth as she returned to the congregation. “There’s someone who’s been absolutely aching to talk to you.”

Michael approached Sam and Dean regally, his chin held at a high angle, though he made his movements soft so as not to intimidate. “It’s been a little while,” he said coolly.

“Michael,” Sam breathed.

“Sam Winchester. Brave young boy you are, derailing the Apocalypse and jumping into the Cage,” he praised. “Never thought I’d see this day.”

“What do you want, Michael?” Dean asked.

“Ah, the Righteous Man, Dean Winchester,’’ Michael said, running a hand down his true vessel’s face. “Still as obstinate as you were then.”

“What do you want, Michael?”

“I want to call a truce,” Michael replied diplomatically. “Your friend Rowena—”

“She’s not our—I’m sorry, continue.”

“She’s done so much for me recently. And I figured I’d call an end to any bad blood we might have with one another. I have no intention on Heaven creating trouble as long as I’m overseeing things up there.”

“Including with Cas?”

“Including with Castiel. I’m granting all of you a full pardon. So long as you refrain from plotting against us. Let I and whichever angels remain do our jobs, and we’ll keep entirely out of your way. On my word.”

“I don’t see why not,” Dean said with a shrug.

As if the party could get anymore exciting, Lucifer appeared before them. “Brother,” he said to Michael. “When I heard someone popped the box open, I had to come take a look for myself,” he explained.

“Lucifer,” Michael said, now more tense than with the Winchesters.

“This is not the place for this,” Dean interjected.

“Believe me, I have no intention of staying,” Lucifer scoffed, rolling his eyes as he looked around the bunker. “Your home is… well, suffice it to say my coming here is never ideal for any of us, agreed? I wanted to come see my older brother. And find my son, of course.”

“I have told you before, Lucifer. I do not want to join you. This is my real home,” Jack insisted, standing close to Castiel.

“So you’ve said. And now that I have a kingdom to run, it doesn’t do me much good to be chasing you all the time. So I figure as long as I know you’re alive, I’ll leave your little caretakers alone. Most of the time.”

“So… both Heaven and Hell. Backing off. Permanently,” Dean said, wrapping his head around the idea.

“About time we got back to our actual job instead of driving the bus away from the cliff,” Sam scoffed.

At that, there was some brief, somewhat uncomfortable conversation before Lucifer decided to leave.

“I’d like to leave without any debts,” Rowena said coolly to the Winchesters. “So, just in case, tell me something I can do to make sure none of you ever come for me.”

Sam had noticed something the second Michael came before them, and now Rowena had given him the opportunity to voice it. “Our brother, Adam.”

“You want me to resurrect someone? Easy. Heaven or Hell?”

“Neither,” Michael said in place of Sam. He gestured to himself. “He’s here.”

“That complicates things. Unless you’ve got a convenient vessel.”

“We do,” Dean interjected, completely on board with Sam’s plan. He gestured to Joseph’s empty vessel, which was lying forgotten on the ground. “Use that one.”

“Easy enough,” Rowena replied coolly. She took a second to come up with the proper spell before she smoothly transferred the archangel from Adam to a new vessel.

“Sam?” Adam asked, unaware he’d been taken from the Cage, given the possession. “Dean?” He looked around himself, perplexed. “What the hell’s going on?”

“You all seem to have… a lot to talk about. Enjoy the rest of your lives,” Rowena said before she swiftly departed, followed shortly by Michael.

When everything was said and done, the world was a lot simpler than it had been in a long, long while.

Lucifer returned to the throne of Hell, with Bela serving splendidly as his Queen of the Crossroads, and actively avoided Michael in Heaven. Occasionally, he would swing by Kansas to check in on his son. But his visits never lasted too long. If his past had taught him anything, it was when he was unwanted.

Michael had gone back to Heaven and restored its glory following the blow-out battle Raphael had induced. He made sure to properly honor Farrah for what she’d done. And, also, for management’s sake, he made sure every angel was privy to what each of Heaven’s alarms meant so that, maybe, just _maybe_ , the system could function usefully rather than create untamable panic. Unlike Lucifer, however, he never visited.

Rowena fled to Scotland and didn’t come back. Occasionally, if Michael needed some sort of touch-up, she’d still offer Heaven her services. But as a general rule she’d decided that it best served her to stay out of things and keep a low profile. Which is exactly what she did.

The Winchesters, Adam, Castiel, Jack, and Elizabeth all remained in the bunker, and they’d continue, as Sam had said, to do what Sam and Dean had signed up for in the first place: chopping off some vampires’ heads and kicking back a cold one. After they had gotten Adam on board with it all, of course.

For the first time in a long time, it seemed everything was as it should have been—no world-ending catastrophes or nigh Apocalypses. Simply saving people, hunting things.

The family business.

It’s worth noting that the night the battle for Heaven had gone down, after the dust had settled, Dean returned to the tree he’d carved a memorial into back when they had held Castiel’s funeral what felt like ages ago.

He crossed out Castiel’s name.

He crossed out Mary’s name.

He crossed out Adam’s name.

He crossed out Rowena’s name.

And, in what space remained at the very top, he carved _Farrah_. And then he set the tree ablaze.


End file.
